Thought: A Philosophical History 2020051593, 2020051594, 9780367000103, 9780429445026, 9780367770945

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THOUGHT: A PHILOSOPHICAL HISTORY

Of all the topics in the history of philosophy, the history of different forms of thinking and contemplation is one of the most important, and yet is also relatively overlooked. What is it to think philosophically? How did different forms of thinking—reflection, contemplation, critique and analysis—emerge in different epochs? This collection offers a rich and diverse philosophical exploration of the history of thought, from the classical period to the twenty-first century. It covers canonical figures including Plato, Aristotle, Descartes and Kant, as well as debates in less well-known areas such as chinese thought and Neoplatonism and the role of speculation in nineteenth-century Russian philosophy. Comprising twenty-two chapters by an international team of contributors, the volume is divided into five parts: • • • • •

Flourishing and Thinking from Homer to Hume The Thinking of Thinking from Augustine to Gödel Images and Thinking from Plotinus to Unger Bodies of Thought and Habits of Thinking from Plato to Irigaray The Efficacy of Thinking from Sextus to Bataille

Thought: A Philosophical History is the first comprehensive investigation of the history of philosophical thought and contemplation. As such, it is a landmark publication for anyone researching and teaching the history of philosophy, and a valuable resource for those studying the subject in related fields such as literature, religion, sociology and the history of ideas. Panayiota Vassilopoulou is Reader in Philosophy at the University of Liverpool, UK. In addition to publishing widely on Neoplatonism and Aesthetics, she has been at the forefront of the development of models for interconnecting history-of-philosophy research with contemporary philosophical practice, particularly social and reflective practices in non-academic institutions (galleries, museums, the cultural industries, and the health sector). Daniel Whistler is Reader in Modern European Philosophy at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK. He is co-author of The Schelling-Eschenmayer Controversy, 1801: Nature and Identity, author of Schelling’s Theory of Symbolic Language: Forming the System of Identity and has edited numerous volumes including the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Modern French Philosophy.

REWRITING THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY

Series editors: Aaron Garrett and Pauliina Remes The history of philosophy has undergone remarkable growth in the English language philosophical world. In addition to more and better quality translations of canonical texts, there has been a parallel expansion in the study and research of sources, thinkers and subjects hitherto largely neglected in the discipline. These range from women philosophers and late ancient thinkers to new Western and non-Western sources alike. Simultaneously, there has been a methodological shift to far greater intradisciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives in the history of philosophy, cutting across the humanities and social sciences. Rewriting the History of Philosophy is an exciting new series that reflects these important changes in philosophy. Each volume presents a major, high-quality scholarly assessment and interpretation of an important topic in the history of philosophy, from ancient times to the present day, by an outstanding team of international contributors. The Senses and the History of Philosophy Edited by Brian Glenney and José Filipe Silva Molyneux’s Question and the History of Philosophy Edited by Gabriele Ferretti and Brian Glenney Information and the History of Philosophy Edited by Chris Meyns Thought: A Philosophical History Edited by Panayiota Vassilopoulou and Daniel Whistler For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/ Routledge-Handbooks-in-Applied-Ethics/book-series/RWHP

THOUGHT: A PHILOSOPHICAL HISTORY

Edited by Panayiota Vassilopoulou and Daniel Whistler

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 selection and editorial matter Panayiota Vassilopoulou and Daniel Whistler; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Panayiota Vassilopoulou and Daniel Whistler to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Vassilopoulou, Panayiota, editor. | Whistler, Daniel, 1982- editor. Title: Thought : a philosophical history / edited by Panayiota Vassilopoulou and Daniel Whistler. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2021. | Series: Rewriting the history of philosophy | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020051593 (print) | LCCN 2020051594 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367000103 (hbk) | ISBN 9780429445026 (ebk) Subjects: LCSH: Thought and thinking--History. Classification: LCC B105.T54 T535 2021 (print) | LCC B105.T54 (ebook) | DDC 128/.3--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020051593 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020051594 ISBN: 978-0-367-00010-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-77094-5 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-44502-6 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by MPS Limited, Dehradun

CONTENTS

Contributors

viii

Introduction: Patterns of thinking Panayiota Vassilopoulou and Daniel Whistler

1

Part I

Flourishing and thinking from Homer to Hume 1 Thinking like a hero Casey Perin

7 9

2 The primacy of practice and the centrality of outlook: Reflections on Chinese ethical traditions Kwong-loi Shun 3 Thinking, theorizing and theoria Stephen Clark

21

36

Part II

The thinking of thinking from Augustine to Gödel 4 The myth of the mental: An Augustinian critique of Dreyfus and McDowell Catherine Pickstock 5 Romantic thinking Nicholas Halmi

47

49

60

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Contents

6 Pure and impure thinking in Hegel’s Encyclopedia Markus Gabriel

75

7 Denkicht—Thicket-thinking with Walter Benjamin around 1917 Peter Fenves

91

8 Formal-syntactical thinking and the structure of the world Paul M. Livingston

101

Part III

Images and thinking from Plotinus to Unger 9 Plotinus: Philosophical thinking as self-creation Panayiota Vassilopoulou

115 117

10 Thinking’s history: Descartes and the past tense of thought Andrea Gadberry

135

11 Polyp-thinking in the eighteenth century Lydia Azadpour and Daniel Whistler

148

12 The mythic imagination as an ‘experiment in philosophy’: Erich Unger’s contribution to the phenomenology of thinking Bruce Rosenstock

162

Part IV

Bodies of thought and habits of thinking from Plato to Irigaray

177

13 Thinking about the unthinkable: Hypothesizing the khôra in the Timaeus Luc Brisson

179

14 Thought in motion: Lucretius’ materialist practice Thomas Nail 15 Thinking philosophically in the middle ages: The case of the early Franciscans Lydia Schumacher 16 The ‘thought-work’; or, the exuberance of thinking in Kant and Freud Stella Sandford

vi

190

205

219

Contents

17 Thinking otherwise with Irigaray and Maximin Rachel Jones

236

Part V

The efficacy of thinking from Sextus to Bataille

251

18 Thinking without commitment: Two models Richard Bett

253

19 Thinking, acting, and acting by thinking: Marx and Althusser Gregor Moder

266

20 ‘Thoughts and purposes have come to me in the shadow I should never have learned in the sunshine’: The development of philosophical thinking in the literature of Frances E. W. Harper Catherine Villanueva Gardner 21 The void of thought and the ambivalence of history: Chaadaev, Bakunin, and Fedorov Kirill Chepurin and Alex Dubilet

279

293

22 The destruction of thought Gil Anidjar

307

Index

320

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CONTRIBUTORS

Gil Anidjar teaches in the Department of Religion and the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University, USA. His most recent book is Qu’appelle-t-on destruction? Heidegger, Derrida (Montreal, 2017). Lydia Azadpour is a researcher at Royal Holloway, University of London, where she is currently completing a project on the concept of species in Kielmeyer, Hegel and Schelling. She is the co-editor and translator of the Bloomsbury edition, Kielmeyer and the Organic World: Texts and Interpretations (2020). Richard Bett is Professor of Philosophy and Classics at Johns Hopkins University, USA. His books include Pyrrho, his Antecedents, and his Legacy (Oxford University Press, 2000), translations of works by Sextus Empiricus, and How to be a Pyrrhonist, a collection of his essays (Cambridge University Press, 2019). Luc Brisson is Emeritus Director of Research at the National Center for Scientific Research (Paris [Villejuif], France; Centre Jean Pépin, UMR 8230 CNRS-ENS, PSL) and is known for his works on both Plato and Plotinus, including bibliographies, translations, and commentaries. He has also published numerous works on the history of philosophy and religions in Antiquity. Kirill Chepurin is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow. He has held visiting positions at Humboldt University, Berlin, and University of California, Berkeley. His research interests include German Idealism and Romanticism, political theology, and critical theory. Stephen Clark is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Liverpool, and an Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Theology at the University of Bristol. His books include Aristotle’s Man (1975), The Nature of the Beast (1982), From Athens to Jerusalem (1984, 2019), Philosophical Futures (2011), Plotinus: Myth, Metaphor and Philosophical Practice (2016), and Can We Believe in People? (2020).

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Contributors

Alex Dubilet is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Vanderbilt University, Tennessee. He is the author of The Self-Emptying Subject: Kenosis and Immanence, Medieval to Modern (Fordham, 2018). Dubilet works across contemporary continental philosophy, critical theory, philosophy of religion, critical study of secularism and political theology. Peter Fenves, the Joan and Sarepta Professor of Literature at Northwestern University, USA, is a professor of German, Comparative Literary Studies and Jewish Studies. He is the author of several books, including The Messianic Reduction: Walter Benjamin and the Shape of Time (Stanford University Press), and Late Kant: Towards Another Law of the Earth (Routledge). Markus Gabriel holds the Chair for Epistemology, Modern and Contemporary Philosophy at the University of Bonn and is Director of its International Centre for Philosophy. His books include Fields of Sense: A New Realist Ontology (Edinburgh University Press, 2015), Why the World does not Exist (Polity, 2015) I am not a Brain. Philosophy of Mind for the 21st Century (Polity, 2017) and The Limits of Epistemology (Polity, 2019). Andrea Gadberry is Assistant Professor at New York University. Her first book, Cartesian Poetics: The Art of Thinking, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2020. Catherine Villanueva Gardner is Professor of Philosophy and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth, USA. Her central interests are in challenging the boundaries and definitions of philosophy through the retrieval of neglected or forgotten historical women philosophers. Nicholas Halmi is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Oxford and Margaret Candfield Fellow of University College, Oxford. Author of The Genealogy of the Romantic Symbol (Oxford University Press, 2007), he is currently completing a study of aesthetic historicism in the period 1650–1850. Rachel Jones is Associate Professor in Philosophy at George Mason University, Virginia. She is the author of Irigaray: Towards a Sexuate Philosophy (Polity, 2011) and of articles and chapters on Kant, Irigaray, and Lyotard. She works on post-Kantian European philosophy as read through feminist, queer, decolonial and critical race perspectives. Paul M. Livingston teaches Philosophy at the University of New Mexico. He is the sole author of four books: Philosophical History and the Problem of Consciousness (Cambridge University Press, 2004); Philosophy and the Vision of Language (Routledge, 2008); The Politics of Logic: Badiou, Wittgenstein, and the Consequences of Formalism (Routledge, 2012); and, most recently, The Logic of Being: Realism, Truth, and Time (Northwestern, 2017). Gregor Moder is Assistant Professor at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. He is currently pursuing a three-year research project on the theatricality of power, part of which is being spent as a Fulbright Scholar at Princeton University. His recent works include Hegel and Spinoza: Substance and Negativity (Northwestern University Press, 2017) and an edited volume on the Object of Comedy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). Thomas Nail is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Denver and author of, among other monographs, Lucretius: An Ontology of Motion (Edinburgh University Press, 2018), ix

Contributors

Theory of the Border (Oxford University Press, 2016) and The Figure of the Migrant (Stanford University Press, 2015). Casey Perin is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of The Demands of Reason (Oxford University Press, 2010) and articles on Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, ancient Scepticism and Descartes. Catherine Pickstock is Norris-Hulse Professor of Divinity at the University of Cambridge. She is author of After Writing: on the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy (1998) and Repetition and Identity (2014). She is currently completing two books, Aspects of Truth and Platonic Poetics. Bruce Rosenstock is Professor of Religion at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His most recent book, Transfinite Life: Oskar Goldberg and the Vitalist Imagination (Indiana University Press, 2010), situates the work of Unger’s friend and intellectual mentor, Oskar Goldberg, within the wider context of German and Jewish philosophy in the Weimar period. He is currently at work on a book, Flesh of One’s Flesh: The Racial Construction of Carnal Israel from the Bible to Black Judaism. Stella Sandford is Professor of Philosophy at Kingston University, UK. She is author of numerous monographs, including Plato and Sex (Polity, 2010), How to Read Beauvoir (Granta, 2006) and The Metaphysics of Love (Athlone, 2000) and currently leads a major research project on ‘Sex Division in Natural History’. Lydia Schumacher is Reader in Historical and Philosophical Theology at King’s College London. She is the author of four monographs: Early Franciscan Theology (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Theological Philosophy (Routledge, 2015), Rationality as Virtue (Routledge, 2015) and Divine Illumination (Routledge, 2011). Kwong-loi Shun teaches at the University of California, Berkeley. He specializes in Chinese Philosophy and Moral Psychology, and his current research is a five-volume work on Confucian Moral Psychology. He was President of the American Philosophical Association (Pacific Division) in 2017–18. Panayiota Vassilopoulou is Reader in Philosophy at the University of Liverpool. In addition to publishing widely on Neoplatonism and Aesthetics, she has been at the forefront of the development of models for interconnecting history-of-philosophy research with contemporary philosophical practice, particularly social and reflective practices in non-academic institutions (galleries, museums, the cultural industries, and the health sector). Daniel Whistler is Reader in Modern European Philosophy at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is co-author of The Schelling-Eschenmayer Controversy, 1801: Nature and Identity (Edinburgh University Press), author of Schelling’s Theory of Symbolic Language: Forming the System of Identity (Oxford University Press) and edited numerous volumes including the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Modern French Philosophy.

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INTRODUCTION Patterns of thinking Panayiota Vassilopoulou and Daniel Whistler

1 A philosophical history of thought This is a book about, in Amélie Rorty’s words, ‘the philosopher’s struggle to think, to define and exhibit the process of thinking’ (2004: xxvii). Evidently, almost all philosophising purports to exhibit some thinking and recent decades have, in this vein, seen the appearance of several volumes dedicated to specific forms of thinking, often in the guise of philosophical methodologies. Nevertheless, a broader history of how philosophers have articulated the kind of thinking that sustains their practice remains relatively underexplored. To this end, what follows is devoted to the multiple ways in which philosophers have defined their own process of thinking and thereby reflected on their own struggle to think. It consists of a series of accounts of various models and practices of philosophical thinking over the last 3,000 years, each revolving around the question: how have philosophers explicitly and implicitly understood what it is to think philosophically? Or more bluntly: what has philosophical thinking looked like over the centuries? Each chapter, then, charts the emergence and evolution of distinctive conceptions of philosophical thought, such as reflection, contemplation, speculation and critique, across a wide range of traditions—from the Homeric era to the 1960s—in a way that eschews broad answers to the question ‘what is thinking?’ (i.e., explorations of thinking in the context of logic, epistemology, or cognitive science) in favour of determinate accounts of thinking in its disciplinary and historical specificity. Thus, at stake in this volume are the following questions: 1. 2. 3.

How have philosophers described what it means to think philosophically, both in respect to their own practice and those of others? How did philosophical practice itself go beyond, challenge, or undermine these explicit accounts of philosophical methodology? In what ways have philosophers contrasted or related these practices to thinking in art, literature, science and religion?

The third question is particularly pertinent for the structure of this volume: what follows consists of interventions not just by world-leading philosophers, but also by those whose discipline borders on philosophy and who therefore aim to characterise the distinctiveness of philosophical thought from outside. The activity of thinking might well be the very kernel of 1

Panayiota Vassilopoulou and Daniel Whistler

the philosophical enterprise, but its very closeness to the philosopher often renders it difficult to thematise determinately. Many of the essays that follow, therefore, attempt to secure a kind of Archimedean point from which to answer the above questions.

2 The various guises of philosophical thinking In his 1951–52 lecture course, Was heißt Denken?, Martin Heidegger undertakes a critique of exactly the sort of project that motivates this volume. He suggests that to know what thinking is can only be undertaken by a kind of practical training; hence, when attempting to think about thinking, what matters are the pedagogical strategies that provoke, encourage and incite the reader. However, he continues, this is something that the mere history of philosophy cannot provide: The learned world is expending commendable efforts in the investigation of the history of philosophy. These are useful and worthy tasks, and only the best talents are good enough for them, especially when they present to us models of great thinking. But even if we have devoted many years to the intensive study of the treatises and writings of the great thinkers, that fact is still no guarantee that we ourselves are thinking, or even ready to learn thinking. On the contrary—preoccupation with philosophy more than anything else may give us the stubborn illusion that we are thinking just because we are incessantly ‘philosophising’. (1968: 5) According to Heidegger, however ‘useful and worthy’ a history of philosophical thinking might turn out to be, it has little to do with actual thinking. In contrast to Heidegger’s relatively monolithic invocation of a ‘thinking’ that both grounds philosophising and stands apart from it, we wish to invoke Amélie Rorty’s notion of ‘the many faces of philosophy’. She writes, Philosophy does not form a single genre. It has differed in its aims and conventions, in its methods and rhetoric. It has differed in its accepted cannon. Sometimes Cicero and Seneca were major philosophic figures, sometimes not; sometimes Bacon, Erasmus, Montaigne were central, sometimes marginal. Sometimes Voltaire and d’Alembert were the major philosophers of the age; sometimes they were read as literature. (2004: xxi) Even if one is limited to the western European men that Rorty here names, her insistence on the varied metamorphoses of philosophical thought is fertile terrain for the historian of philosophy. She invokes a kaleidoscopic philosophical trajectory that, from decade to decade, throws up new patterns of thinking, new canons of thought and new configurations of philosophers. Nevertheless, in practice, it is striking how few of us follow Rorty in detailing these continual transformations of what it means to think philosophically. Much of the best recent literature on what counts as thinking in philosophy is either ahistorical in tenor (e.g., Beyer and Burri 2007; d’Oro and Overgaard 2017) or delimits the subject to just one concept or one historical period (e.g., Bénatouïl and Bonazzi 2012; de Boer and Sonderegger 2012). It thereby somewhat neglects the key Rortian principle of metamorphic variety. Of course, no volume can provide a truly global vision of ‘how the world thinks’ (as Julian Baggini has recently tried 2

Introduction

(2018)), nor of how the world has variously gone about thinking throughout its history; however, the chapters that follow do attempt—both by themselves and by way of the juxtapositions and contrasts that hold between them—to mark out thinking practices and how they have been theorised from Homer to Irigaray. The value of so doing, we contend, is not merely to exhibit historical diversity for diversity’s sake; it is also to overcome our preconception that we know what thought looks like, that we are already completely familiar with every guise of philosophical thinking, that we can both acknowledge profound thinking when we see it and also recognise, what Arendt calls, ‘the absence of thinking’ (1981: 3). Indeed, the worry that we might not be sufficiently familiar with diverse traditions of thinking to be able to unmask thoughtlessness when it occurs is particularly pressing—and it is for a reason such as this that histories of philosophy become increasingly useful. The lucid recognition of thinking when it occurs surely requires some familiarity with those metamorphoses, revolutions and leaps undergone by philosophical thinking over both time and space. And this volume is a small contribution to cataloguing these changes and so, hopefully, enriching our awareness (both conceptually and historically) of what counts and has counted as an ‘inclination to stop and think’ (Arendt 1981: 4).

3 The structure of the volume This book is not (and could never endeavour to be) a global history of philosophical practices of thinking. What follows neither ‘explodes’ the canon by attending solely to forgotten philosophers and traditions, nor does it comprehensively cover all the canonical bases. Rather, we have, as far as possible, attempted to attend to the edges and margins of what ‘we’ tend to take philosophical thinking to be. And the contributors have undertaken this task in a number of ways: by, for instance, recovering philosophical accounts of thinking situated at the limits of canonical orthodoxy; by depicting more familiar bodies of thought from an unexpected perspective; or by focusing on those blurred edges where the discipline of philosophy is harder to distinguish from other disciplinary practices of thinking, such as those in the arts, sciences, religions or psychoanalysis. Specifically, this means that the chapters that follow include analyses of both well-known and lesser-known philosophies from perspectives that encompass the analytic and the continental traditions as well as interdisciplinary perspectives. Of course, what these chapters achieve could only ever be partial, and the work of expanding and redrawing the limits of contemporary historiographies of philosophy is ongoing. Our hope is that the necessary incompleteness of the volume be ultimately taken as a virtue—stimulating others into undertaking similar projects. In this vein, Part One of Thought: A Philosophical History considers some of the many ways in which philosophical thinking has been understood to be a component part of human flourishing across traditions. Casey Perin and Kwong-loi Shun attempt to make sense of what it means to think in a morally beneficial manner by looking to some founding texts. Thus, Perin provides an account of the models of practical deliberation present in Homer’s epic poetry in order to show that Homer ends up recognizing something real about moral deliberation that Plato and Aristotle miss, whereas Shun looks for models for contemporary ethical reflection in Confucian sources. And, Stephen Clark interrogates the advantages of philosophical thinking in the Platonic tradition—that is, he tries to answer the question: what is the good of trying to think in a philosophical way when animals manage so well without it? Part Two is devoted to metaphilosophical determinations of thinking in the history of philosophy. Catherine Pickstock appropriates a tradition of thought running through Augustine 3

Panayiota Vassilopoulou and Daniel Whistler

and Aquinas that foregrounds embodiment, situatedness and temporality to challenge contemporary naturalisms. In Chapters Five and Six, Nicholas Halmi and Markus Gabriel both turn to the various relations that hold between thinking, thinking about thinking and thinking about thinking about thinking (and beyond) in post-Kantian Germany. Halmi charts the productive uses made of such distinctions in Jena Romanticism, while Gabriel turns to recent debates over the status of Hegel’s Logic, in conversation with Frege’s theory of the proposition, to show that, even in the rarefied air of Hegel’s mature system, thinking needs to be verified and probed in light of its capacity to engage with empirical. Finally, in Part Two, Peter Fenves and Paul M. Livingston turn to the first decades of the twentieth century to scrutinise the relation between formalisation, logic and truth in Walter Benjamin’s early debates with neo-Kantianism, phenomenology and ‘logistics’ and in Kurt Gödel’s responses to Carnap and the early Wittgenstein, respectively. Part Three then turns to some creative and metaphorical features of philosophical thinking both in terms of the way thinking has been related to imagery and also in terms of the way thinking has itself been imaginatively articulated. Panayiota Vassilopoulou takes the former route in reconstructing the relationship between philosophical thinking and creative activity in Plotinus’ metaphysics and epistemology. By challenging what has been traditionally regarded as a relationship of opposites, she argues for an understanding of self-knowledge as a form of selfmaking. Likewise, in Chapter Ten, Andrea Gadberry rethinks the role of images from the past in Descartes’ account of philosophising, particularly the strange status he accords intellectual memory, so as to argue that Descartes ultimately understands the value of thinking the past in a hermeneutic key. Lydia Azadpour and Daniel Whistler, on the other hand, describe how, in eighteenth-century Europe, successful (and, occasionally, unsuccessful) philosophical thinking was sometimes imagined according to a metaphor of a freshwater polyp, which generates new material out of itself. They show that, in Diderot, Bonnet and Kielmeyer, thinking takes on polypic properties. Bruce Rosenstock then rounds off Part Three with a consideration of a relatively forgotten twentieth-century phenomenologist, Erich Unger, whose account of philosophical thinking as mythic invention both marks him apart from many other philosophers of the era but also speaks directly to more contemporary concerns with ecological anthropologies. Part Four looks to various ways in which philosophical thinking has been inculcated within bodies and habits. In Chapter Thirteen, Luc Brisson provides a close reading of Plato’s attempt to think the khôra in the Timaeus, detailing the challenges to philosophy that thinking an unthinkable body raises. Thomas Nail focuses on a series of passages from Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things to bring out the interrelation between poetry and material bodies in his philosophical vision and Lydia Schumacher provides a more global account of philosophical habits in the Middle Ages, with particular emphasis on the ways in which a group of early Franciscan philosophers made creative use of scholastic methodologies to intervene in debates over human psychology. The topic of Stella Sandford’s contribution is thinking gone wrong: she shows how Kant’s early ‘Essay on the Maladies of the Head’ sheds light on Kantian thinking by way of specifying the various ways in which reason and the understanding can malfunction, and she puts them into dialogue with Freudian psychoanalysis. And in the final chapter of Part Four, Rachel Jones moves to the twentieth century to consider how bodies and thinking have collided with each other in post-WWII feminist and post-colonial philosophies around concepts of otherness and métissage. The volume concludes with Part Five which is dedicated to the relation (or lack of relation) that holds between forms of philosophical thought and its erstwhile other—the ‘real’ world of history, action and materiality. Richard Bett begins with a fine-grained analysis of what kind of philosophical thinking is possible once, following the Sceptics, one suspends all claims about 4

Introduction

how things really are. Bett points out that such a position puts into question the very relationship philosophy might have to non-philosophical modes of thinking. In Chapter Nineteen, Gregor Moder intervenes in Marxist determinations of thought and particularly the presuppositions and reception of Marx’s notorious Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach (‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it’) with particular reference to the relation there established between philosophical understanding and revolutionary change. Catherine Villanueva Gardner reads the novels of the American writer, Frances Harper, as philosophical initiations: the ethico-political trajectory of her fiction is, according to Gardner, intended to uplift intellectually the newly liberated African American community. In Chapter Twenty-One, Kirill Chepurin and Alex Dubilet turn to models of speculative thinking in late nineteenth-century Russia, arguing that this is a tradition of thinking that opposes itself to the violence and hierarchies of the world, thereby ungrounding it as a void. Finally, Gil Anidjar concludes the volume with an intervention from outside, marshalling the resources of anthropology, critical theory and black studies to critique the fetishization of ‘thinking’ in the Western philosophical tradition. In sum, therefore, the chapters that follow elucidate a series of models for thinking in the history of philosophy. And, in so doing, our hope is that they reveal some of the many revolutions, evolutions, patterns, configurations, conjunctions and disjunctions that emerge across the history of philosophical thinking practices.1

Note 1

We would like to thank the series editors Aaron Garrett and Pauliina Remes, the anonymous reviewers, as well as Tony Bruce and Adam Johnson for their most valuable support and advice. We are grateful to the School of the Arts, University of Liverpool for supporting two workshops in June 2019 that gave the opportunity to contributors to this volume to co-develop and disseminate their ideas. Last but not least, we would like to thank our authors for their contributions, commitment and enthusiasm, particularly during this time of crisis which makes a global and inclusive dialogue on thinking and reflection all the more important.

References Arendt, H. (1981) The Life of the Mind, Vol. 1: Thinking, New York: Harcourt. Baggini, J. (2018) How the World Thinks: A Global History of Philosophy, London: Granta. Bénatouïl, T. and M. Bonazzi (eds.) (2012) Theoria, Praxis, and the Contemplative Life after Plato and Aristotle, Leiden: Brill. Beyer, C. and A. Burri (eds.) (2007) Philosophical Knowledge, Amsterdam: Rodopi. de Boer, K. and R. Sonderegger (eds.) (2012) Conceptions of Critique in Modern and Contemporary Philosophy, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. d’Oro, G. and S. Overgaard (eds.) (2017) The Cambridge Companion to Philosophical Methodology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heidegger, M. (1968) What is Called Thinking?, (trans.) J. G. Gray, New York: Harper and Row. Rorty, A. O. (2004) Introduction: Witnessing Philosophers, in A. O. Rorty (ed.), The Many Faces of Philosophy: Reflections from Plato to Arendt, Oxford: Oxford University Press, xiii-xxxv.

5

PART I

Flourishing and thinking from Homer to Hume

1 THINKING LIKE A HERO Casey Perin

1 Introduction Anyone reading the Iliad or the Odyssey will notice, as Bernard Williams has written, that ‘Homer’s characters are constantly wondering what to do, coming to some conclusion, and acting’ (Williams 1993: 22). Homer describes people engaging in practical deliberation, making a decision on the basis of their deliberation, and acting on their decision. Here, I first consider how Homer’s characters deliberate about what to do. They do so, I suggest, in all the various and importantly different ways in which we deliberate about what to do. In itself, this conclusion shouldn’t be particularly surprising. However, I argue next, it confirms that Homer’s conception of practical deliberation is more capacious and, so, less artificial than the philosophical models of that phenomenon we find in either Plato’s Socratic dialogues or Aristotle’s ethical treatises. I then turn from the form of Homeric practical thinking to its content. When a Homeric hero deliberates about what to do, his deliberation is governed by a code that is broadly ethical and distinctively heroic. This code provides the most fundamental standards for practical success and failure in Homeric. I argue that for a Homeric hero, practical success is complete only if it has spectators: a hero succeeds only when others witness his success. Hence, practical success for a Homer hero requires giving an ethical performance, and that performance must itself be a success. Sometimes it is not, and at least in some cases the heroic code itself makes that failure unavoidable. In this way, I argue, Homer recognizes something real that Plato and Aristotle miss: the sort of ethical and so practical dilemma in which failure is necessary because success is not so much as possible.

2 Homeric deliberation Often in Homer, a character must decide whether or not to do a certain action, and the decision is made after an episode of deliberation. So, to start with a well-known example early in the Iliad, Achilles is wondering whether to kill Agamemnon. A plague sent by Apollo is devastating the Greek army at Troy. At an assembly called by Achilles, the prophet Kalchas reveals that Apollo is angry with Agamemnon for dishonouring his priest Chryses. Earlier Agamemnon had refused to accept ransom for the priest’s daughter, Chryseis, whom Agamemnon acquired as a prize (γέρας), that is, as part of his share of the booty taken by the 9

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Greeks during a recent raid on a nearby city. Now he agrees to return Chryseis to her father and appease Apollo, but doing so will leave him alone among the Greeks without a prize (ἀγέραστος). That is not acceptable, Agamemnon insists, and since he feels challenged and insulted by Achilles, he announces that he will replace Chryseis by taking Achilles’ own prize, the girl Briseis, from him. In this way, Agamemnon tells Achilles, ‘you may know well how much greater [φέρτερος] I am than you’ (Il. 1.185–86).1 The possibility of killing Agamemnon now enters Achilles’ mind. In his view, and it is a view endorsed by Athena, Agamemnon’s behaviour and especially his disregard for Achilles’ honour and his status in the army, violates basic norms that govern the relations between fellow warriors and between a commander and those under his command.2 Hence, Achilles thinks he has reason to kill Agamemnon. However, Achilles also recognizes that he has reason to check his anger and refrain from killing Agamemnon. At a minimum, doing so would trigger retaliation on the part of Agamemnon’s brother Menelaus and his allies, undermine the unity of the Greek army (such as it is) and give the Trojans an opportunity for victory. And so, as Homer tells us, Achilles turned over (ὥρμαινε) these two options in his mind (Il. 1.193). His deliberation appears to reach a conclusion as he begins to draw his sword. At this point, Athena arrives and gives Achilles an additional and complex reason to consider: Hera forbids him from killing Agamemnon. She does so, Athena explains, because she cares for Agamemnon and Achilles equally (ὁμῶς). Hence, were he to kill Agamemnon, Achilles would disobey Hera and incur her wrath. Moreover, Athena tells Achilles that someday he will be more than compensated for his loss of Briseis and the outrage he suffers at the hands of Agamemnon (Il. 1.207–14). Achilles must decide whether, given what has happened between them, he should kill Agamemnon. His deliberation comes to an end at this point because he now has a conclusive reason not to kill Agamemnon.3 There are many episodes of this sort in Homer, though few so significant. Odysseus deliberates about whether or not to abandon his raft and try to swim to the shore of Phaiakia (Od. 5.354–64). Much later in the Odyssey he considers whether or not to kill the serving women as they pass him, disguised as a beggar, on their way to spend the night with the suitors (Od. 20.5–24). Zeus watches as Sarpedon and Patroclus confront one another in battle and wonders whether or not to save Sarpedon (Il. 16.435–38). Often the deliberative question is not whether to do some action A, but whether to do A or B where B is not simply refraining from doing A. Washed ashore on Phaiakia, Odysseus wonders whether to spend the night sleeping by the river or in the forest (Od. 5.464–74). Once he encounters Nausica, he deliberates whether to grasp her knees in supplication or to speak to her from a distance (Od. 6.141–47). After Odysseus has slaughtered the suitors, the singer Phemious deliberates whether to slip out of the royal palace and take refuge at the altar of Zeus or to supplicate Odysseus directly by grasping his knees (Od. 22-330–39). Frequently the practical question for a Homeric character is not of the form ‘Should I do x or y?’ but ‘How do I achieve my end or goal E?’ Zeus deliberates how to honour Achilles (Il. 2.2–4) and Hera deliberates how to deceive Zeus and keep him out of the fighting as Poseidon leads the Greeks, many of them wounded, back into battle (Il. 14.159–60).4 Athena tells Telemachus that after he has travelled to Pylos and Sparta, and if he learns that his father Odysseus is dead, he must consider how to kill the suitors himself (Od. 1.293–96). Odysseus deliberates how he and his men can escape from the cave of the Cyclops Polyphemos (Od. 9.420–24). Here and elsewhere (e.g., Od. 9.316–18, 11.230, Il. 2.5) deliberation concludes with a plan (βουλή) for achieving the end or goal that serves as its starting point. Peisistrator, a son of Nestor, deliberates how Telemachus can leave Pylos at once without being detained by Nestor (Od. 15.202–14). Once Odysseus has arrived back in Ithaca, he spends much of his time 10

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considering how, with Athena’s help, he can slaughter the suitors (Od. 19.1–2, 19.51–52). They vastly outnumber him, and this fact creates one of several practical problems he must solve. He tells Athena that he can’t sleep because he is deliberating how he can kill the suitors and how, if he does manage to kill them, he can escape from their relatives who will try to avenge their death (Od. 20.38–43 with 23.117–22). These two kinds of practical deliberation—about whether to do something and about how to do it—are not mutually exclusive in Homer. Deliberation about whether to do x or y might be complicated by the fact that y is to be done only if a certain condition C is satisfied. Here the answer to one question about a fixed set of practical options (‘Should I do x or y?) is dependent on the answer to a different and prior question (‘How can I satisfy C?’) about how to achieve a certain end or goal. The effort to answer both questions does not involve two separate episodes of deliberation: part of what is being considered in deliberating whether or not to do y, and so whether to do x or y, is how if at all condition C can be satisfied. A striking example of this sort of complex deliberation is proposed but then quickly abandoned by Zeus at the outset of Book 4 of the Iliad. The gods are gathered upon Olympus but divided in their loyalties. Some, like Hera and Athena, are strongly attached to the Greeks, others, like Aphrodite, to the Trojans. Zeus exhorts the gods to deliberate collectively whether to continue the war between the Greeks and the Trojans or to end the war by establishing friendship (φίλοτης) between them. The latter action is a practical option only if, as Zeus says, peace can be achieved on terms agreeable to all parties involved, the gods included (Il. 4.14–19). Since Hera declares immediately that under no conditions will she accept peace between the Greeks and the Trojans, the only option left to Zeus is to continue the war. Elsewhere in Homer deliberation aims to answer the very general question ‘What should I do (now, in these circumstances)?’ The initial deliberative task here is to identify the actions open to one (rather than to choose between them) or the end or goal to be pursued (rather than the means by which to pursue it). At one point in the fighting, Hector has been struck by a rock, but Apollo has revived him and sent him back into battle. Seeing most of his fellow Greek warriors retreat in fear of Hector, Thoas recommends that only the best (ἄριστοι) remain to try to stop him from reaching and setting fire to the Greek ships. Homer does not describe the course of Thoas’ deliberation, but he does report its conclusion and the reasons that brought Thoas to that conclusion. These include the facts that Hector has returned to battle, that under the circumstances (namely, his having been recently seriously wounded by Ajax), Hector’s return is an indication that some god is helping Hector, and that this fact, in turn, makes it likely that Hector will again kill many Greeks. Hector fighting with the help of a god will be too much for all but the very best Greek fighters, and so only they should face him now (Il. 15.281–99). Thoas’ recommendation is best understood as an answer to the question ‘What should we Greeks do now that Hector has returned to battle?’ And Thoas answers that question by first identifying a practical option not registered in the less general question ‘Should we Greeks retreat or stand our ground?’ Earlier, Nestor encounters Agamemnon, Odysseus, and Diomedes, who have all been wounded in the fighting. The Trojans have broken through the Greek wall and the Greeks are in retreat. Nestor urges the Greek leaders to consider what they should do now, if it is still possible to accomplish anything by deliberation or planning (Il. 14.61–62). And he takes the first step in their collective deliberation by proposing that, since they are wounded, the Greek leaders should not join the battle (Il. 14.62–63). Agamemnon then recommends that the Greeks flee Troy in defeat, Odysseus castigates him from doing so and observes that the Greeks will be slaughtered as they retreat, and Diomedes proposes that, wounded as they are, the Greek leaders return to battle and continue fighting (Il. 14.74–132). 11

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Finally, deliberation in Homer can aim to identify an action that satisfies a certain description. The deliberative question is not of the form ‘Should I do x or y?’ or ‘How do I achieve end or goal E?’ or ‘What should I do?’ but ‘What is the F thing, or the most F thing, I can do (now, in these circumstances)?’ Diomedes and Odysseus have entered the Trojan camp at night on a spying mission. They find the Thracians asleep, and while Diomedes kills Thracians, Odysseus steals their horses. When Odysseus signals to Diomedes to withdraw, Diomedes does not move. He has asked himself, and is trying to answer, the question ‘What is the most brutal thing I can do?’5 He has identified several candidate actions (seize the Thracians’ chariot, kill still more Thracians as they sleep) when Athena intervenes and urges him to withdraw now in case some god should wake the Trojans who would then pursue him back to the Greek ships (Il. 10.503–11). We might be tempted to think of Diomedes as deliberating here about how to achieve a goal, namely, the goal of doing the most brutal thing he can in the circumstances. But Diomedes has this goal only in the trivial sense that it is something he wants to do. In particular, Diomedes is not asking how he can do something (e.g., kill all the Thracians in their sleep quickly and without waking any nearby Trojans) he has already identified as the most brutal thing he can do. Instead, he is asking what action available to him counts as the most brutal thing he can do. Only once he has an answer to this question can he begin to consider how to execute that action.

3 Philosophical models of deliberation To the extent Homer describes characters as thinking about what to do and making decisions, he has a conception of practical deliberation. That conception is broad: characters in Homer decide and act on the basis of importantly different kinds of reasoning. In contrast, Plato and Aristotle each offer a philosophical model of the phenomenon Homer describes. Where Homer gives us examples of thought leading to action, Plato and Aristotle identify those features that in their view make an episode of reasoning an instance of practical deliberation. In this way they provide a maximally general but still informative account of what practical deliberation is. And where Homer’s conception of practical deliberation is broad, the philosophical models of it found in Plato and Aristotle are narrow. On those models, much of the practical thinking done by Homer’s characters, and so by us as well, does not count as practical deliberation. In Plato’s Protagoras Socrates presents practical deliberation as a matter of evaluating a possible course of action with reference to a single value, pleasure. The deliberative task is always to answer a question of the form ‘Does action x produce more overall pleasure or pain?’6 Obviously, it is possible to answer this question only by determining just how much overall pleasure and pain x produces. Hence, Socrates says, deliberating about what to do is a kind of weighing. When you evaluate an action you are considering performing, ‘you put together the pleasures and the pains, both those near and those distant in time, place them on the balance scale, and say which of the two is greater’ (Protagoras, 356B1–3). Skill in practical deliberation is thus an expertise in measurement (μετρητικὴ τέχνη). Anyone with this skill can accurately measure the hedonic value of the actions open to her in a given situation. Deciding whether to do or to forgo x, or whether to do x or y, is just a matter of calculating whether doing x produces more overall pleasure (or less overall pain) than forgoing x or doing something else y. The essential features of practical deliberation are thus (1) the evaluation of one or more possible courses of action (2) in order to decide what it is best to do in a given situation, whatever the criterion for an action being best happens to be. Call this the evaluative model of deliberation.7

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This model is implicit in Plato’s Euthyphro and, more generally, in Socrates’ efforts in a number of Plato’s dialogues to elicit from his interlocutor a satisfactory account or definition of the virtues. Euthyphro is a self-professed expert on religious matters, including piety, who is prosecuting his own father for the murder of an employee on the family farm on Naxos who is a murderer himself (having killed, in a drunken fit of rage, a slave belonging to Euthyphro’s family). Euthyphro undertakes his controversial action confident that he knows what piety requires in this situation. Socrates then asks Euthyphro to tell him what he claims to know, that is, what piety is. And, Socrates makes clear, the knowledge of piety he wants to acquire from Euthyphro is ultimately practical. Euthyphro has agreed that all the many pious actions are pious because of some one form—the form of piety—they have in common. Socrates tells Euthyphro ‘Teach me then what this form [ταύτην τὴν ἰδέαν] is in order that I may look to it, use it as a model, and say that anything you or anyone else does of that kind is pious, and if it is not, that it is not’. (Euthyphro 6e4–7) Socrates seeks knowledge of what piety is because he wants to use it as a guide in practical deliberation. He agrees with Euthyphro that deciding whether it is best for Euthyphro to prosecute his father is a matter of determining whether it is pious for him to do so. Hence, the deliberative task for Euthyphro is to evaluate the actions open to him with respect to piety. Someone who (unlike Euthyphro) knows what piety is can discharge this task by making a correct decision—a decision to do what is in fact pious and to avoid doing what is in fact impious. More generally, we determine what it is best for us to do in a situation by evaluating possible actions with respect to the virtue relevant to that situation (courage on the battlefield, moderation in the presence of physical pleasures, etc.). In the Apology, Socrates expresses a particularly strong version of this view of practical deliberation. He tells the jurors at his trial that a person ought ‘to consider only this whenever he acts, whether he does what is just or unjust [πότερον δίκαια ἢ ἄδικα πράττει], and whether his actions are those of a good or a bad person’ (Apology 28b8-c1). Characters in Homer often deliberate in a way that conforms to the evaluative model. In addition to the examples I’ve already mentioned, Menelaus deliberates whether to retreat and abandon the body of Patroclus and its armour or to stand his ground and fight, alone, Hector and the advancing Trojans. (Il. 17.91–105). Agenor, sent by Apollo to face Achilles, evaluates three options open to him: flee with the rest of the Trojans back into the city, run away from Achilles across the plain and hide in the undergrowth by the river, or stand firm and face Achilles in battle. He concludes that since the first two options will almost certainly result in Achilles’ killing him in a way that does him no honour, and since it is at least possible, however unlikely, for him to defeat Achilles in battle, he resolves to stand his ground (Il. 21.552–70). The important point, though, is that there are many examples of practical deliberation in Homer that do not conform to the evaluative model. Homer presents the evaluation of different courses of action as one, but only one, form that practical deliberation can take. In the Protagoras, Socrates transforms what might otherwise be, as it is in Homer, a description of what some people do sometimes under certain circumstances into a model of what anyone does whenever he or she deliberates about what to do.8 According to Aristotle, practical deliberation is always the process of investigating how to realize an end or achieve a goal. That end is fixed prior to deliberation and provides its starting point. A person deliberates when, at a minimum, it is unclear to him how he can realize the end in question. His task is to reason back from the end he aims to realize to some action he can take 13

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to realize, or at least begin to realize, that end (see here especially Eudemian Ethics 2.10 1127a15–18). And so, Aristotle says, ‘we deliberate not about ends, but about what forwards those ends [βουλευόμεθα δ᾽οὐ περὶ τῶν τελῶν ἀλλὰ περὶ τῶν πρὸς τὰ τέλη]’; in general, and after the example of a doctor or any other expert practicing his expertise, those who deliberate ‘take the end as fixed and examine how and by what means it will come about [θέμενοι τὸ τέλος τὸ πῶς καὶ διὰ τίνων ἔσται σκοποῦσι]’.9 Deliberation can (but need not) produce a decision (προαίρεσις) whose structure reflects both the starting point and the conclusion of the deliberation that produced it: it is the decision to do some action x for the sake of some end E.10 In this way, Aristotle thinks, the person who forms a decision reveals both what he has decided to do and the end for the sake of which he does it (Eudemian Ethics 2.10 1226a11–13). On the Aristotelian model, then, deliberation always aims to answer a question of the form ‘How do I realize end E in circumstances C?’ But what about the other ways of thinking about what to do that do not aim to answer this question? One option for the Aristotelian is to claim that some kinds of practical thinking fail to count as deliberation. Instead, they are kinds of thinking required to provide deliberation with its starting point (by identifying the end to be realized) or to execute a decision produced by deliberation. However, there is little reason to restrict the scope of deliberation in this way. A better option for the Aristotelian is to recast what appear to be different kinds of practical thinking as different ways of reasoning about how to realize an end. And the Aristotelian can exercise this option in at least two ways. First, he can argue that deliberating whether to do or forgo x, or whether to do x or y, is always deliberating whether some end E can be realized by doing x or by doing x rather than y. And deliberating about whether to realize E is reducible to deliberating about how to realize E.11 I can reason my way to the conclusion that E is (or is not) the end I should attempt to realize in the circumstances, but I do so by determining how E can be realized. So I conclude that I should not attempt to realize E only by trying and failing to identify an acceptable way of doing so. And I conclude that I should attempt to realize E rather than some other end G only by identifying how each end can be realized by me and so what the consequences of doing so are for the other ends I will or might attempt to realize in other situations. Secondly, the end that provides deliberation with its starting point is always at a distance from the person who aims to realize it (otherwise there would be no need for deliberation). If the notion of distance at work here is expansive, many different kinds of practical thinking might count as reasoning about how to realize an end. Anscombe has something like this in mind when she writes that ‘The mark of practical reasoning is that the thing wanted is at a distance from the immediate action, and the immediate action is calculated as the way of getting or doing or securing the thing wanted. But it may be at a distance in various ways’. (Anscombe 2000: sec. 41) The obvious case involves an end that is distant in space or time from the agent and her action. But Anscombe suggests there are less obvious cases. My end might be to do something that satisfies a certain description, and by reasoning I identify an action that satisfies that description. The distance between end and action here is a matter of the difference between the description of the end and the description of the action: one and the same thing satisfies both descriptions, but the description of the end is more general or ‘wider’ than the description of the action. So, in Anscombe’s example, my end is to rest, and I conclude that I can rest by lying on a bed. Here the deliberative task is to reduce the general to the sufficiently particular. The same is true in those cases where my end is to act in accordance with a moral principle. Along these lines the 14

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Aristotelian might distinguish, as David Wiggins does, two ways of deliberating about how to realize an end and so two forms of practical deliberation: technical and non-technical (Wiggins 1980: 224–28). Technical deliberation aims to identify the causal means to an end that is remote in space and time; non-technical deliberation aims to generate a specification of an end that is remote in the sense that its initial description is general, vague, or indeterminate. Non-technical deliberation concludes when it arrives at a specification of the end that is precise enough to trigger technical deliberation about the means to that end. Although, to one degree or another, these strategies make the Aristotelian model of practical deliberation less narrow and so more plausible, none are fully convincing. First, the essential feature of practical deliberation, according to this model, is reasoning about how to realize an end. But now the Aristotelian faces a dilemma. If she construes the notion of reasoning about how to realize an end narrowly, then the Aristotelian model fails to capture many different kinds of practical deliberation. However, if the Aristotelian construes the notion of reasoning about how to realize an end broadly, that notion loses the explanatory value it is supposed to have. After all, Aristotle thinks that what makes practical thought or deliberation practical, and so distinguishes it from non-practical thought, is the fact that it is reasoning about how to realize an end. (De Anima 3.10 433a13–15). The notion of reasoning about how to realize an end should be illuminating: it should allow us to understand why an episode of thinking is practical. This is not the case if the notion is so capacious that all the different kinds of practical thinking found in Homer count as reasoning about an end. Those kinds of thinking have little in common beyond the fact that they are all practical. Hence, any notion of reasoning about how to achieve an end that applies to all of them is vacuous. Describing an episode of thought as an instance of reasoning about an end would amount to no more than affirming that, rather than explaining why, it is practical thought. A second and related point is that it is at best unclear what independent reason we have to count the various kinds of reasoning that led to action as different ways of reasoning about how to realize an end. Hector is alone outside the walls of Troy and must decide whether to face Achilles alone in combat, or try to bargain with him for an end to the war, or simply retreat to safety within the city walls. The possibility of being killed unarmed, as though he were a woman, rules out the second option, while shame and fear of being reproached for his folly by someone inferior to him prevents Hector from exercising the third option. He resolves to face Achilles only once he realizes he has no reason to do otherwise (Il. 22.98–130). Why would we say that Hector here is reasoning about how to realize an end unless we were already convinced that, given that he is thinking about how to act, he must be reasoning in this way? We need what we don’t yet have, namely, some antecedent reason to think that any instance of practical deliberation is, in some sufficiently broad but still illuminating sense, reasoning about how to realize an end. This need is especially pressing in view of the many and significant differences between the forms of thinking about how to act described by Homer.

4 The hero and his code Homer’s characters act, as any agent must, for reasons, and the reasons for which they act are part of Homer’s conception of practical thinking. In particular, there is an ethical code that governs the actions of the Homeric hero. Since a hero has fully internalized this code, its requirements on him are requirements he places on himself. That is why ethical exhortation and criticism is so often self-directed in Homer: the hero applies the heroic code to himself, commands himself to follow it, and castigates himself for violating it. In the context of the Iliad, at least, a hero is someone who is, above all, the best and bravest in battle. (For this point see 15

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Schein 1984: 80). When Achilles leaves for Troy, his father Peleus commands him ‘always to be best and to pre-eminent among others’ (αἰὲν ἀριστεύειν καὶ ὑπείροχον ἔμμεναι ἄλλων; Il. 11.784).12 This is just a highly compressed expression of the heroic code: Peleus is urging Achilles to do all that, as a hero, he ought to do especially, but not exclusively, on the battlefield. When Agamemnon and Diomedes are both wounded, Odysseus is left alone on the battlefield surrounded by Trojans. He debates with himself whether to remain and fight or to retreat. If he remains, one before many, he may be captured and killed, and that prospect terrifies him. However, it would be a very bad thing (μέγα κακόν) for Odysseus to run away in fear. That is so, in turn, because running away from battle is just what the bad, base, or cowardly (the κακοί) do. And that fact settles the matter for Odysseus. He is deliberating about what, in the circumstances, it is good for him to do, and that is whatever it is the person who is good (ἀγαθός), and especially good in battle, would do. And, as Odysseus knows, anyone who is good in battle (ὅς ἀριστεύῃσι μάχῃ ἔνι) stands his ground even though he will be killed by doing so (Il. 11.403–10). There is a certain broadly ethical standard that Odysseus applies to his action. That standard is not as indeterminate or formal as doing the admirable or noble or fine (καλόν) thing. Instead, it is the standard of being good where the notion of goodness is thick: to be good is inter alia to be brave, to be worthy of and to have honour, and to be the object of respect and deference. Death is bad, but for Odysseus a certain kind of ethical failure is worse. However, it is a mistake to attribute to Odysseus (or any Homeric hero) the goal of doing what is good and being good. Describing Odysseus here as reasoning about how to achieve a goal or realize an end badly distorts the course his deliberation actually takes. He considers in turn the two options open to him, and he identifies a consideration against each option. Odysseus comes to a decision by making more explicit why it would be bad for him to retreat (namely, that were he to do so, he would be acting like someone who is base or cowardly). The heroic code does not provide Odysseus with a goal but a set of constraints on his actions that, in the context of deliberation, rule out actions otherwise available to him.13 This is also the case with Diomedes who, against the advice of Sthenelos, refuses to retreat as Pandaros and Aeneas approach. The reason for his refusal is simple: retreat would be unworthy or dishonourable (Il. 5.252–56).14 Diomedes, like Odysseus, forgoes an action because it is unheroic. Whatever he does on the battlefield, it must be heroic, but Diomedes’ goal is not to act heroically. It is to kill Trojans, and now that they are coming for him, Pandaros and Aeneas in particular. Moreover, it is important that other people observe, remember, and report heroic action. In this respect, heroic action is a kind of performance, and if that performance is flawed, its flaws are principally ethical. The performative aspect of heroic action is clear from Sarpedon’s formulation of the heroic code in the Iliad. A hero receives privileges and special treatment from his tribe (choice meats, full cups of wine, prized plots of land), and in return a hero must (χρή) fight in the front in battle. This is not the necessity of discharging an obligation.15 Instead, Sarpedon explains, the hero must fight in order that (ὄφρα) others may witness his fighting and declare him worthy of the privileges and special treatment he has received (Il. 12.310–28). Later in the narrative Menelaus must decide, as Hector and the Trojans advance on him in battle, whether to retreat and abandon the body of Patroclus and its armour or to stand his ground and fight alone. His first thought is that any Greek who sees (ἴδηται) him retreat will criticize him for doing so. Alternatively, if out of fear of what others will say about him, he fights Hector and the Trojans, he will be badly outnumbered. But, as this case makes clear, the heroic code is not without nuance. There is an additional fact relevant to the evaluation of Menelaus’ practical options, namely, that Hector is clearly fighting with the help of a god (ἐκ θεόφιν πολεμίζει). Since that is so, no Greek who sees Menelaus will reproach him for retreating (Il. 17.90–105). 16

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Diomedes shows the same sort of concern for his ethical performance when he resists Nestor’s recommendation to retreat given that Zeus has made it clear that on this day, at least, he is with Hector. Nonetheless, Diomedes worries about what Hector (but surely not just Hector) will say about him if he retreats now. Nestor reassures Diomedes that no one would believe Hector (or, again, anyone else) if he called Diomedes base and cowardly (κακὸν καὶ ἀνάλκιδα). Still, Hector taunts Diomedes by declaring that if he flees, the Greeks themselves will treat him with contempt as being no better than a woman. And Diomedes is sufficiently moved by the prospect that others, Greeks and Trojans alike, will judge his action as an ethical failure that he considers not once but three times fighting Hector (only to be deterred each time by a sign [σῆμα] from Zeus) (Il. 8.145–71). The Homeric hero can fail to give a satisfactory ethical performance in either of two importantly different ways. In the more common case, ethical failure occurs where ethical success was at least possible. There is something the hero ought to do, and if he does it, his action is heroic, and so exempt from criticism; if he doesn’t do it, his action is unheroic, and others disapprove of him (in some instances no more than he disapproves of himself). No hero in Homer (not even Hector) is perfectly heroic, but few are as frequently unheroic as Paris. When Menelaus steps forward to challenge him, Paris backs down. Hector denounces him as a disgrace (λώβη) and object of contempt and mockery (ὑπόψιον ἄλλων) who lacks courage (Il. 3.39–45). Later, Hector rebukes Paris for sitting in his chambers inside the walls of Troy while out on the plain the Trojans fight on his behalf. And Helen tells Hector that she wishes she were the wife of a better man (ἀνδρὸς ἀμείνος) who, unlike Paris, is sensitive to the disapproval of others and has a sense of shame (Il. 6.326–51).16 In both cases Paris’ ethical failure is a matter of failing to do something (stand his ground before Menelaus, join in the fighting) that, had he done it, would have made his action an ethical success. Of course, Paris’ most spectacular ethical failure is his abduction of Helen from Sparta. His action violates a wide range of norms constitutive of the heroic code, including the norms of hospitality that govern both host and guest. The suitors in the Odyssey transgress many of these same norms. Athena tells Telemachus that anyone with the proper ethical sensibilities would be outraged upon seeing the many shameful things the suitors are doing (Od. 1.228–29). But where the suitors failed ethically they might have succeeded: after all, there is a right way to behave as a suitor to Penelope. In the less common but philosophically more significant case, there is no possibility of ethical success. The hero may have practical options, but these options are little more than different forms his ethical failure can take. In the first book of the Iliad, the conflict between Agamemnon and Achilles reaches a point where neither can avoid ethical failure. Consider, first, Agamemnon. Once Agamemnon agrees to return Chryseis to her father in order to appease Apollo and save the Greek army, he must decide whether or not to replace the prize he is giving up with a new token of honour. If he does not, then his honour is compromised as he alone goes without a prize. And that, as Agamemnon says, is not right or appropriate (Il. 1.119). Hence, he dismisses Achilles’ proposal to wait until the Greeks conquer Troy when Agamemnon will be repaid many times over for the loss of Chryseis. It is intolerable for any hero, let alone one who is (as Nestor reminds Achilles) greater (φέρτερος) than all others, to maintain an honour deficit indefinitely (Il. 1.279–81). Yet, Agamemnon can have a new prize for the one he has lost only by taking that prize from someone else (as all prizes have been distributed to members of the army and none are left unclaimed). Moreover, Agamemnon’s new prize will be comparable in value to his old one only if he takes it from someone whose status in the army is comparable to his, e.g., Ajax, Odysseus, or Achilles (Il 1.137–38). Agamemnon can restore honour to himself only by dishonouring someone else. Hence, he

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can’t do both of the things the heroic code requires him to do, namely, secure his own honour and show the proper regard for the honour of others.17 When Agamemnon declares that he must be given a new prize or he will seize the prize Achilles or some other hero now has, Achilles describes him as someone clothed in shamelessness (ἀναιδείην ἐπιειμένε). Since Agamemnon’s threat has dishonoured him, Achilles announces he will leave Troy to return to his home in Phthia. In response, Agamemnon declares that he will replace Chryseis by taking Achilles’ prize, the girl Briseis. And now Achilles is left with no option that provides an ethically satisfactory resolution of the situation. He can allow Agamemnon to take Briseis and continue to serve under Agamemnon’s command in the Greek army. But this option is an ethical dead-end: as Achilles explains to Nestor, taking it would render him a coward (δειλός) and so, in the context of the Iliad, a person of no worth (οὐτιδανός) (Il. 1.293). Alternatively, Achilles can prevent Agamemnon from taking Briseis by killing him. But, as Athena’s intervention makes clear, that course of action is ethically unacceptable. Finally, Achilles can surrender Briseis and then withdraw from battle and so cease to fight on behalf of Agamemnon and Menelaus. This is the option he chooses, but, as the remainder of the Iliad reveals in detail, the problems with it are many and devastating.

5 Conclusion The sort of practical dilemma in which Agamemnon and Achilles are caught is not so much as possible on the models of deliberation presented by Plato and Aristotle. These models allow for practical failure—after all, that is a minimum condition of adequacy on any philosophical account of how we think about what to do—but that failure always occurs where practical success in one form or another was possible. In the Protagoras, deciding what to do is just a matter of determining which of those actions available to us produce the most overall pleasure (or least overall pain). We might miscalculate and so make the wrong choice, and we might do so because in the circumstances it is extremely difficult to work out the precise hedonic value of our possible actions. Nonetheless, each of those actions has a precise hedonic value, and the correct measurement of those values would enable us to make the correct choice and achieve practical success. That is why Socrates says that our salvation in life (σωτηρία τοῦ βίου) is a certain kind of practical knowledge or skill he dubs expertise in the measurement (μετρητικὴ τέχνη) of pleasures and pains (Protagoras 357A5B2). Elsewhere in the Socratic dialogues, the value that guides deliberation is virtue rather than pleasure. In wondering what to do we are wondering what, in the circumstances, virtue requires or forbids us to do. But here, too, failure occurs only where success is possible. And that is because here, too, ethical failure is due entirely to ethical ignorance, and ethical success requires only ethical knowledge. Euthyphro does what is impious because he does not know what piety is, and had he known, he would have done what is impious. Whether ethical knowledge in the Socratic dialogues takes the form of expertise in the measurement of pleasures and pains or wisdom about virtue and its requirements, it guarantees ethical success. In Aristotle, failure is a matter of mistaking the means to our end, and that is easy enough to do when the end is especially remote and the chain of actions required to achieve it long and complex. Nonetheless, either we can achieve the end that sets our deliberative task, or we can’t. If we can, then practical success is a matter of identifying and taking the means to that end. If we can’t achieve our end, then success consists in our recognizing this is so (by trying and failing to identify a means to it) and abandoning, in these circumstances and at least for the moment, that end in favour of another we can achieve.

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Homer’s presentation of practical thinking is far from complete, and we will find some features of the deliberative episodes he describes, including some of the reasons for which Homeric heroes act, exotic. Nonetheless, Homer gives us, as neither Plato nor Aristotle do, some sense of the many very different ways in which we can think about what to do, succeed or fail in our practical deliberations, and find ourselves in situations where no outcome of our deliberation is fully satisfactory. And there is a lesson here about how to construct a philosophical model of practical deliberation (or, really, a philosophical theory of anything). We should not first try to say in general what practical deliberation is and then turn to questions about whether this or that episode of thinking is an instance of practical deliberation. Proceeding in this way just codifies whatever our initial or default conception of practical deliberation happens to be.18 Instead, we need to begin from as full and varied a description as possible of the phenomenon to be modelled. That is one reason why imaginative literature, beginning with Homer, can have significant value for philosophy.

Notes 1 φέρτερος means ‘superior’ and Agamemnon’s point is that even if Achilles is superior to him in certain respects (e.g., Achilles is physically stronger and more capable in battle), Agamemnon is superior to him overall. For this point see Kirk (1985: 72.). 2 This assessment of Agamemnon’s behavior is expressed compactly in Achilles description of it as hubris (ὕβρις) (Il. 1.203), a description Athena also applies to it (Il. 1.214). In the Iliad this term occurs only in these two passages, but it is used often in the Odyssey to describe the behavior of the suitors, e.g., Od. 1.368, 4.321, 4.627, 17.169. 3 For the point that in some cases in Homer when a god intervenes in a someone’s deliberations, he or she does so by giving that person reasons for or against an action, see Williams (1993: 29–30). 4 Here the fact that Zeus and Hera are deliberating about how to achieve an end, rather than deliberating about whether or not to do a certain action or about which among a small set of available actions to do, is marked in Greek by the adverb that introduces the object clause of the verb of deliberation (e.g., μερμηρίζω, ὁρμαίνω, φράζομαι). Achilles deliberates about whether to kill Agamemnon or not (ἢ…ἦε); Zeus deliberates how (ὡς) to honor Achilles, Hera deliberates how (ὅππως) she could deceive Zeus. 5 Diomedes asks himself: ‘What is the κύντατον thing I can do?’ Lattimore (1951) renders κύντατον as ‘best’, but this is both too weak and colorless and has the wrong ethical valence. κύντατον is a thick ethical term denoting what is most characteristic of a dog and so what is most shameless, outrageous, or brutal. See here especially the discussion of the role and symbolic significance of dogs in Homer in Redfield (1994: 193–203). See also Williams (1993: 30–31 and 178 n.24). 6 I set aside here questions about whether the character Socrates (let alone Plato) endorses the hedonism that provides the model of deliberation described in the Protagoras with its starting point. Hedonism is part of an argument Socrates makes against the possibility of akrasia or acting against one’s knowledge (or belief) about what it is best for one to do. That argument is dialectical: it aims to persuade the many who take akrasia to be possible and so employs only premises they will accept (including hedonism). For this reason, and especially in view of the fact that Socrates accepts the conclusion of the argument, it is a question for interpretation whether he also accepts its premises. 7 I borrow this label from the illuminating discussion in Callard (forthcoming). 8 For a different view, see Sharples (1983: 6 n.7). 9 Nicomachean Ethics 3.3 1112b11–12 and 15–16. I follow, and occasionally modify, the translation in Broadie and Rowe (2002). See also Eudemian Ethics 2.10 1126b9–12 and 1127a5–8. 10 For this point, see Eudemian Ethics 2.11 1127b36–37 and Broadie (1991: 179). 11 For one version of this line of thought, see Broadie (1991: 241). 12 See also Il. 6.208 where Glaukos says that his father gave him the same command. Glaukos’ father makes explicit what Peleus leaves implicit, namely, that the injuction to be best is the injunction to act as your ancestors, who were themselves the best (ἄριστοι), acted. Failure to do so results in shame. 13 For a different reading of this passage, and the claim that Odysseus closely resembles Aristotle’s courageous person, see Gill (1996: 73–75). 14 Diomedes says that it would not be γενναῖον for him to withdraw from battle (Il. 5. 253). To my

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15 16 17 18

knowledge this is the only occurrence of this word in Homer. What Diomedes means is that withdrawing from battle is inconsistent with his birth, family, and upbringing, and so his social status—that is to say, with his status as a hero. Hence, the action Sthenelos proposes is unheroic. Here translators like Lattimore (1951/2011) and Fagles (1990) who render the Greek modal by having Sarpedon talk of the hero’s ‘duty’ go badly astray. For this way of understanding Helen’s remark—that Paris does not know νέμεσίν τε καὶ αἴσχεα πολλ᾽ἀνθρώπων—see Redfield (1994: 113–15). See the useful remarks on the conflict between Agamemnon and Achilles in Cairns (1993: 99–100). I have in mind in the sort of methodological advice given by Millgram (1997: 8–9) who, at least in the philosophical investigation of practical reasoning, favors what he calls ‘bottom up’ over a ‘top down’ philosophy.

References Anscombe, G. E. M. (2000) Intention, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Broadie, S. (1991) Ethics with Aristotle, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Broadie, S. and Rowe, C. (2002) Aristotle: Nicomachean Ethics, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cairns, D. L. (1993) Aidōs: The Psychology and Ethics of Honour and Shame in Ancient Greek Literature, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Callard, A. (forthcoming) ‘Aristotle on Deliberation,’ in R. Chang and K. Sylvan (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Practical Reason, London: Routledge. Fagles, R. (1990) The Iliad, Introduction and Notes by Bernard Know, London: Penguin Books. Gill, C. (1996) Personality in Greek Epic, Tragedy, and Philosophy: The Self in Dialogue, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kirk, G. S. (1985) The Iliad: A Commentary, Vol. 1: Books 1–4, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lattimore, R. (1951/2011) The Iliad of Homer, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Millgram, E. (1997) Practical Induction, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Redfield, J. M. (1994) Nature and Culture in the Iliad: The Tragedy of Hector, Expanded Edition, Durham and London: Duke University Press. Schein, S. (1984) The Mortal Hero, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Sharples, R. (1983) But Why Has My Spirit Spoken with Me Thus? Homeric Decision-Making, Greece and Rome 30: 1–7. Wiggins, D. (1980) Deliberation and Practical Reasoning, in A. Rorty (ed.), Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Williams, B. (1993) Shame and Necessity, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

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2 THE PRIMACY OF PRACTICE AND THE CENTRALITY OF OUTLOOK Reflections on Chinese ethical traditions Kwong-loi Shun

1 Introduction In this chapter, I present a mode of ethical reflection that characterises certain Asian traditions, in particular Confucianism, and that differs from certain common strands in contemporary philosophical discussions. It is characterised by two features—the primacy of practice and the centrality of outlook. These are shared features of three main traditions of thought in China—Confucianism, Daoism (as exemplified in the Zhuangzi), and Chan (or Zen) Buddhism (as exemplified in the Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch)—but I will focus on Confucianism in my discussion.1 Highlighting this mode of reflection not only helps our understanding of Chinese thought, but is also relevant to contemporary philosophical inquiry and teaching. Some contemporary philosophers have voiced apparently similar dissatisfaction with the current direction of moral philosophizing (e.g., McDowell 1989; Murdoch 1970; Oakeshott 1989), but my main concern is not criticism. I view this mode of ethical reflection as not replacing, but filling a gap in, contemporary philosophical discussions. In Sections 2 and 3, I focus on the primacy of practice—i.e., this mode of reflection is driven primarily by a concern to make a direct ethical difference to our lives, rather than to understand our ethical lives as an object of study. In Sections 4 and 5, I focus on the centrality of outlook—i.e., on this mode of reflection, the cultivation of certain ethical outlooks plays a central role. In Section 6, I conclude with a discussion of some implications of this mode of reflection.

2 The primacy of practice Consider the following incident that occurred two decades ago. For many years, I had taught a course on ethical theories with fairly standard content—consequentialism, Kantian and then Aristotelian ethics. I had not come across any instance of plagiarism until, in one semester, I encountered three such instances. I asked the three students the obvious questions. If they are interested in learning from the course, why plagiarize? And if they are not interested in learning from the course, why enroll in the first place? I got exactly the same answer from all three. They 21

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actually had no independent interest in the course. But, in the preceding year, they had plagiarized in some other courses. They were found guilty of academic dishonesty by the Office of Student Conduct, and part of the disciplinary action was to require them to take this course. Many of us would find something amusing in this incident. To the extent we do, it has to do with an obvious mismatch of expectations, a mismatch between what the Office of Student Conduct expects from a course on ethical theories, and what many of us, as professors who teach the subject, expect. As professors, we see our role primarily as teachers of reflective ethics, of certain reflective views on the ethical lives of humans. We do talk to our students about the importance of academic honesty, but professors of other subjects do the same. As professors, we see our primary role as teachers of certain subject matters, whatever that might be. Teaching academic honesty is not our primary role, but something we do in the course of performing our primary duties. The fact that we teach reflective ethics does not put us in a better position to perform this other role, compared to professors of physics or history. By contrast, the Office of Student Conduct assumed that, by virtue of the subject we teach, we play a special role in the ethical improvement of students. They assumed that our primary role is to teach students to be ethical, in a way that makes a direct ethical difference to their lives. Instead of teachers of reflective ethics, they saw our role as ethical teachers. These two kinds of activities need not be mutually exclusive. In teaching reflective ethics, our focus is primarily on teaching an understanding of our ethical lives, where such understanding takes on a more removed form, like the posture of an observer. But such understanding is not totally unrelated to practice. In principle at least, through teaching this kind of understanding, we can also enable the student to put that understanding to practice. In the contemporary philosophical context, there is, after all, a sub-branch of ethics labelled ‘applied ethics’. Conversely, in ethical teaching, though our focus is on the direct ethical improvement of students, we also teach them to be reflective. We encounter from time to time challenging exigent situations which requires some minimal degree of reflectivity. And to better equip themselves for this form of teaching, the teachers may also engage in general reflections on ethical issues that they personally encounter or have been brought to them by students and associates. On the basis of these reflections, they make general observations about the human condition and about our ethical lives, which they then communicate to their students to better equip the latter for their own ethical improvement. The activity of ethical teaching cannot be totally devoid of some degree of reflectivity, and we may refer to that activity as reflective ethical teaching. While these two kinds of activities are not mutually exclusive, they are clearly different in focus. In teaching reflective ethics, our focus is on teaching a more removed kind of understanding of the subject matter, in a way not that different from the way a professor teaches epistemology or metaphysics, physics or history. By contrast, in reflective ethical teaching, our focus is more immediately on the ethical improvement of students, and this often involves working with them individually, helping them find ways of addressing ethical challenges they actually confront. While we still seek to facilitate their understanding of the issues at hand, there is also an intelligible sense in which we would say they do not really understand if their supposed understanding does not inform their practice. This notion of understanding is practical and experiential in character, a point to which we will return. What I just presented portrays a fundamental difference between the activities of most Confucian thinkers and those of most contemporary professional philosophers who teach ethics. The Confucians are deeply practical in orientation, and seek actively to put into practice the ethical ideal they advocate, through direct political involvement and teaching. Most major 22

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Confucian thinkers, including Confucius (sixth to fifth century B.C.), Mencius (fourth century B.C.), Zhu Xi (1130–200) and Wang Yangming (1472–529), are politically active and attract gatherings of students. Students and associates come to them for ethical advice, and they advise them individually or in small groups. Their teachings evolved on the basis of reflecting on ethical issues that they, their students and associates, actually encounter. Except for Zhu Xi who writes more extensively, their ideas are conveyed mostly through their sayings and dialogues as recorded by students. They are reflective ethical teachers and, aside from their active political involvement which is unique to the Confucians, this focus on practice is shared by Daoism and Chan Buddhism. The two kinds of activities result in two different kinds of learning communities. One is primarily focused on understanding our ethical lives as an object of study. Its members engage in collective intellectual endeavours to seek better understanding, and their focus when teaching students is to facilitate such understanding. Their reflective views are shared through mechanisms familiar to us, such as journals and conferences. There might be the hope that this understanding will also inform the lives of its members, but whether this happens is incidental to the activities that take place within this primarily intellectual community.2 The other kind of community is primarily focused on practice. Its members are devoted to personally living up to certain shared ethical ideals, and to putting them into practice in the public realm, through ethical guidance of students and associates and, for the Confucians, active political involvement. While they also reflect on ethical issues that arise from practice, they are interested in sharing such reflective views only to the extent that it contributes to practice. Some (such as Wang Yangming and certain Chan Buddhist masters) regard the communication of reflective views as largely irrelevant, or even a hindrance because such views divert attention away from actual practice and might generate a fixation on ethical improvement that obstructs its progress. Others (such as Zhu Xi) see teaching such reflective views as conducive to the student’s ethical improvement. In any instance, it is agreed that it is ethical practice, rather than the formulation of reflective ethical views, that carries primary significance. This is not primarily an intellectual community, but a community of practice. To elaborate on the characteristics of the mode of ethical reflection that characterizes this kind of community, I will distinguish between three aspects of ethical reflection—what the nature of the ethical life is, why humans should so live, and how humans can live ethically. I will speak mostly of the Confucian perspective, but will also refer occasionally to Daoism and Chan Buddhism.

3 An alternative mode of ethical reflection On the question what?, Confucian thinkers address the question in relation to ethical challenges arising in concrete situations that they, their students and associates, actually encounter. These are largely familiar situations, such as wrongful injury of oneself, or hardships and losses. Their practical recommendations are often directed to countering certain common human tendencies. For example, in responding to wrongful injury of oneself, one should not regard the injury as a personal challenge and should not focus on countering the supposed challenge; instead, one should focus attention on the situation as an ethically problematic situation and on responding to it in an ethically appropriate manner (see Shun 2015a). In responding to hardships and losses, one should not feel resentful nor be overwhelmed by one’s sense of frustration, and should instead stand apart from the situation and from one’s emotional responses to it, in a way that enables a more proactive and balanced response (see Shun forthcoming a). Responding appropriately to such situations often involves managing one’s own psychology to overcome 23

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tendencies that incline one otherwise; other examples include the need to overcome one’s tendency to be prideful, in the different forms that such tendency takes. This leads to the question how?, to which we will return. Although the Confucians do on occasion confront unusual and challenging ethical dilemmas, such as a conflict between family and state, these are rare and not the norm, and are to be dealt with in context and with discretion. Their main concern is with the familiar ethical challenges that arise on a day-to-day basis, instead of preoccupying themselves with such quandaries. Nor do they ponder on hypothetical situations that are described in abstraction from the complex concrete details that surround ethical challenges that humans actually confront; for them, doing so has little practical relevance. In contemporary philosophical discussions, consideration of such hypothetical situations is often viewed as a way of clarifying our thinking in relation to a certain area of life, often with the goal of abstracting some general ethical consideration that can guide our ethical decisions in situations where that consideration comes into play. Ethical considerations of this kind can then provide the basis for a more systematic and unifying account of our ethical life, so that the appropriate way to address specific situations can be derived from these more basic considerations. The Confucians show little interest in seeking some unifying account of this nature. Properly responding to ethical situations that we encounter involves cultivating a sensitivity to the complexities of such situations and exercising good judgement of a kind that cannot be easily generalized to other situations. There is no reason to believe that there can be a unifying account that has some set of ethical considerations as its basis. This does not mean that Confucians do not make generalizations. I mentioned earlier some general observations they would make about the way to respond to wrongful injury or personal hardships. Another example is the ideal of one body, which involves one’s responding to situations involving harm to others in a way comparable in nature to one’s response to situations involving harm to oneself (see Shun forthcoming b). Yet another example is the ideal of no self, which characterizes the sage as someone who does not draw a distinction of significance between oneself and others. Being prideful, viewing wrongful injury of oneself as a personal challenge, or being insufficiently sensitive to situations involving harm to others, all involve one’s assigning some special significance to oneself that ‘separates’ oneself from others (see Shun 2018). But these general observations are not about some basic ethical considerations from which specific ethical responses can be derived. Instead, they are abbreviated ways of referring to some common threads running through the specific responses. Turning to the question why?, Confucian thinkers also show no interest in seeking some foundational grounding for our ethical lives. That is, they do not engage in the search for some set of considerations that have a hold on any supposedly ‘rational agent’ independently of any pre-existing ethical agreement, and that one can appeal to as a basis for critiquing an entire social practice or for grounding a whole way of life for humans. Their interest in the question why? is primarily in response to an actual practical need, whether uncertainties about certain aspects of existing practices that have come into question, or doubts among one’s associates, or disagreements with others including competing schools of thought. When inquiry into the why question no longer serves a practical purpose—the uncertainty has been addressed or there is no realistic hope of resolving a disagreement—such inquiry comes to a stop. The way they address the why question can be characterized in terms of the notion of ethical appeal, a process very different from the kind usually associated with the idea of ethical justification in contemporary philosophical discussions. Ethical appeal has to do with making an ethical proposal attractive to the audience by reference to considerations that constitute common ground between both parties. It need not, and rarely does, take the form of some 24

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linear and structured process by which one is led step by step to some conclusion. Instead, the considerations invoked are varied. One might invoke a certain understanding of the human condition that one shares with the audience, of shared life experiences or aspirations, and even of certain interests that engage the audience but not shared by oneself.3 One might highlight what one sees as unacceptable consequences of adopting or preaching an opposing view, or how those proposing an opposing view do not actually practice it.4 One might engage the audience in exercises of imagination, such as imagining how the audience might respond to certain situations, in the hope that the audience can then resonate with what one has proposed.5 And one might cite the example of historical or legendary figures who have supposedly exemplified what one proposes and whom the audience agrees to be exemplary figures.6 The kind of considerations invoked vary and depend on the issue at hand; ultimately, the goal is to make a practical difference by bringing about the desired change in the audience. As I just mentioned, the kind of ethical challenges that mature adults more often confront are less a matter of what to do than a matter of how we manage our psychology in a way that enables us to respond appropriately, not just in action, but also in thoughts and sentiments, in motivations, and in the way we direct our attention. It is to the question how? that Confucian thinkers devote most of their attention. Sometimes, it can be a matter of my being unable to do, or unable to do with the appropriate focus and dedication, what I already realize I should. I might be tempted to act otherwise, or lack the endurance to persist in what takes time to accomplish. Sometimes, it can be a matter of being subject to psychological forces that I realize, at least implicitly, are skewing my response. I feel an urge to respond with some demeaning comment to an insult, but catch myself, take pause, and refrain. Or, I find myself influenced by my personal like or dislike of someone in performing some official duty, as when grading a paper, and seek ways to bracket my personal feelings so as to make a judicious judgment. Or, when giving a professional presentation, I catch myself starting to say things that are not intellectually relevant but are geared toward impressing the audience, and have to restrain myself. Sometimes, even when everything in my outward response is in order, I might still be subject to thoughts and sentiments that I recognize as problematic. Though the past offence has been addressed, and though I now behave entirely appropriately toward someone who has insulted me in the past, the lurking ill feeling in me reveals itself in subtle signs such as the pleasure I felt when I heard about some tragedy that has befallen the latter’s family. These are the kind of ethical challenges that we most often confront, and the question is how we manage our own psychology to enable the proper response. Addressing such challenges is not a matter of developing our intellect, but a matter of psychological inner management, viz. techniques of managing our own psychology. There is a variety of such techniques. We can invoke imageries in the way we view a situation. If I am prompted to be inattentive and dismissive when interacting with a junior colleague, simply because of her junior standing, I can try to view her as if she is a rising star in the profession. If I find myself overly casual at a ceremony for commemorating the deceased, I can put myself in such a frame of mind that it is as if the deceased were present. If I find myself insufficiently sensitive to some occurrence, I can invoke certain images or memories—images of what a starving child looks like if I am untouched by news of children dying of famine, or memories of how a friend had cared for me when I was sick if I am unmoved by news of her death. Another technique is to actively redirect our attention in certain ways. If I become overly angry because I take an offence too personally, I can try to redirect attention away from how I have been personally slighted and toward the situation as a whole—what are the circumstances in which it transpired and what would be an appropriate response setting aside my personal 25

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grievance. We can also try to shift to a different way of viewing a situation. If I am distressed by my recent poor performance at a presentation, I can think to how an occasional poor performance is to be expected even from the best of philosophers. Confucian texts are filled with descriptions of such techniques, usually set in the context of concrete examples. Examples include how we should make efforts to keep ourselves alert and watchful, catching problematic influences on our psychology and correcting them as soon as they arise. One technique, often referred to as ‘sitting in meditation’, is to practice gathering one’s thoughts, calming one’s mind, sharpening its awareness, and focusing one’s attention, in preparation for actually engaging in specific tasks or interacting with others. This kind of preparatory exercises are not unfamiliar to us—we often set aside some quiet time to gather our thoughts and calm our minds before an important presentation, and when preparing for some demanding project, we would clear away other tasks beforehand so that our mind will not be distracted. Sometimes, one might be under the grip of certain psychological forces so that one is unable to engage in these exercises on one’s own, in which case external help is needed. A student devastated by her failure to be admitted to medical school is unable to get her mind off this traumatic setback, is paralyzed and has lost interest in any activity, and is engaged in selfdoubting which further reinforces her distress and paralysis. Parents or teachers might try to steer her to a different perspective by, for example, inviting her to shift attention to her other talents and how these might lead to an equally fulfilling career, or to think about how her present setback would appear quite insignificant looking back in another twenty years. They might invite her to think about historical figures who, after some serious setback, went on to great accomplishments, or to think of this setback in other terms, like the inevitable fall that a child experiences when learning to walk. As we advance in age and experience, we become more self-sufficient in this regard, but might still need help from time to time from someone more experienced, just as the students of the Confucian or Chan Buddhist masters often go to their masters for advice. For the Confucians, reflections on these questions are primarily practical in character. For example, in situations in which one is moved to deviate from what one recognizes as proper, their reflections concern how, in practical terms, one can overcome the psychological forces at work, and do not take the form of a theoretical question about how ‘weakness of the will’ is possible. As another example, Wang Yangming’s students sometimes bring to the master questions about how they can deal with the obstructing effects of their overly fixated preoccupation with being ethical. Wang would give practical advice on how one can steer a path between being insufficiently attentive to one’s ethical progress and being overly pre-occupied and stringent. This is different from the theoretical discussions in contemporary philosophy about ‘ethical self-indulgence’, such as a question about whether there is a ‘self-centeredness objection’ to the kind of ethical theory that emphasizes the cultivation of virtues. Ultimately, on this mode of ethical reflection, the primary ethical task is to become the kind of person who would respond appropriately to the situations one confronts without the need to further manage one’s psychology when the occasion arises. The question how? also concerns how one can become such a kind of person, or how to cultivate the relevant ethical outlooks.

4 The centrality of outlook On this mode of ethical reflection, the emphasis on the practical also comes with an emphasis on understanding the operations of our psychology in concrete terms, rather than in terms of some abstract conception that does not fit in with their actual complexities. This results in a way of conceptualizing our relation to our environment quite different from the way it is often 26

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understood in contemporary philosophical discussions. There are two aspects of this conception—the way we relate to specific situations of ethical significance that we encounter, and the nature of our more enduring relation to the human community and to the world at large. To start, let us consider the way we experience and respond to what we encounter on a dayto-day basis. For convenience, I will refer to this as the way we respond, or just our responses, with the understanding that our responses also include how we experience what we encounter. Two kinds of locutions are commonly used in the English language to describe our responses. One presents them as directed to some object. For example, we are angry at someone, and we have sympathy for or empathize with someone. The other presents them as directed to some occurrence, happening, or state of affairs. For example, we also speak of our being angry at what someone has done or at what is going on. Though less frequently, we speak of our having sympathy for or emphasizing with someone’s condition, and use other locutions such as our being touched or pained by what is happening to that person. I will say of the second kind of locutions that they present our responses as being directed to situations, where the word ‘situation’ is understood broadly to include occurrences and happenings, someone’s being in a certain condition, someone’s doing something, or just any state of affairs. Although the first kind of locutions is common, it appears that the responses they describe are still primarily responses to situations rather than to objects as such. When I am angry at someone, my response is not to him as such, but to his doing certain things. When I have sympathy for someone, my response is not to her as such, but to her being in a certain condition.7 When describing such responses, we often invoke a distinction between the mind and the heart. For example, it touches my heart to see TV images of starving children obviously in pain, and I engage in some deliberation in my mind to figure out how to help. Correspondingly, in contemporary philosophical discussions, we often distinguish between the cognitive and the affective, assigning judgements and beliefs to the former, feelings and desires to the latter. A third category, the volitional, is invoked to encompass psychological operations that have to do with our exercising our ‘will’ to do something. This distinction between mind and heart is an incidental feature of the English language absent from certain non-European languages. In Chinese and some East Asian languages, there is just one single term referring to that which exhibits all the psychological functions just described.8 This observation about languages aside, it seems more plausible to conceptualize that which exhibits all these psychological functions as one single faculty; after all, it is the person as a whole that interacts with its environment and whose psychology operates in these ways. From this point on, while I will follow the conventions of the English language in speaking sometimes of the mind and sometimes of the heart , this way of speaking does not assume that our psychological operations pertain to two different faculties. They all pertain to one single faculty, which we may refer to as the ‘heart/mind’ if needed. It is this single faculty that experiences and responds to the situations we encounter. Sometimes, a response can be easily separable into distinct elements that fit into the usual categories of the cognitive, affective, and volitional. For example, I go to the supermarket to purchase some item. I judge that this is the item I want, I decide to purchase it, and I feel pleased that it costs less than I expected. I could have made that same judgement without deciding to purchase the item, and could have decided to purchase it without feeling pleased about the price. But more often, especially in situations with ethical significance, our response is a complex package that is not easily separable into distinct elements in this manner. Imagine that we are presented with a photo of our parent, invited to stick a needle into the eye, and promised some handsome reward if we do so.9 Many of us would find abhorrent the 27

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prospect of so acting, and feel that doing so would be committing some form of injury to our parent. We can say that we judge that the action is injurious to, or appears injurious to, our parent, that we feel a certain way about so acting, and that we decide, at least implicitly, that we would not so act. But the supposed judgement about injury is not something that could have obtained, in the form it actually does, without our feeling that way about the action and without our being repelled by the prospect of so acting. Nor could we describe the way we feel about and are repelled by the action, in the actual form that the feeling and sense of repulsion take, other than in terms of our viewing the proposed action as injurious, or as if injurious, to our parent. These different elements of our response are inextricably intertwined and, for most of us, there is something ethically deficient in someone who does not share such a response, at least initial response, when presented with a similar situation. Our responses to situations of ethical significance often take this form. Consider the earlier examples that involve an ‘as if’ mentality.10 When commemorating a deceased parent at the side of her grave, our thoughts, sentiments, and demeanour should be such that it is as if the deceased parent were present. And I can try to counter my prideful tendency when interacting with a junior colleague by viewing her as if she is a rising star. In these examples, my way of experiencing and responding to the situation is a complex package with intertwined elements that could not be separated into distinct elements that can individually obtain, in the same form they actually do, without the others. The point can also be illustrated with examples involving the shifting of perspective.11 Consider the student who has been totally devastated by her setback. Whatever parents or teachers might say to her, and however much she might agree, even agreeing that this particular setback does not have the towering significance that she sees it as having, her sense of devastation would not go away until she comes to have a shift in perspective that involves her coming to see her present setback in a different light. Such a change can only be described in terms of a whole package with intertwined elements; although it can be described as involving certain changes in her judgements, sentiments, and motivations, the relevant change in one element cannot come about, in the form it does, without corresponding changes in the other elements. Against the background of a presumption of a clear distinction between the cognitive, affective, and volitional, this alternative way of conceptualizing our responses to situations might appear a deviation from standard expectations that needs to be argued for.12 But there is no reason why we should endorse that presumption, which is itself specific to certain philosophical traditions. From this other perspective, the default is to view our way of experiencing and responding to situations in terms of a complex package with different, often intertwined, elements. While we can, in certain situations such as the supermarket example, distinguish between elements of our responses that fall into the usual philosophical categories, this is not the norm. More often, especially in situations of ethical significance, our responses take the form of complex packages that cannot be appropriately described in such terms. For such situations, a natural way of describing the responses is in perceptual terms, as when we described the student as coming to see her setback in a different light. To cite another example, consider someone with a deep-seated bias against members of a minority group. Even if the person comes to be sincerely convinced that he should treat them as equals, the bias lingers and subtly manifests itself in various ways, such as a pattern of avoiding sitting next to members of that group in public transportation, without his consciously choosing to do so. That he does, in some purely cognitive sense, believe that he should treat them as equals can be seen from his embarrassment or self-blame when that pattern is brought to his attention, and from his making genuine efforts at change. But, despite that belief, he does not really view these 28

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individuals as equals until the deeply entrenched bias has been truly rooted out, which again involves a fundamental shift in the way he views the minority group. That it is natural to describe such responses in perceptual terms is likely due to certain parallels with visual perception. For example, when we talk about ‘seeing’ in a visual context, we might be referring to what is visually presented, what is salient among what is visually presented, and what is visually presented under certain modes of conceptualization. As I walk through a plaza, there are things that I ‘see’ without noticing (but can recall afterward if asked) and things that I ‘see’ in the sense of consciously attending to them, as well as certain modes of conceptualization that shape what I ‘see’ in either sense (e.g., ‘I see a couple engaged in a heated argument’). Similarly, when my heart/mind experiences and responds to a situation, there are things that it is aware of without noticing and things that it consciously attends to, as well as certain modes of conceptualization that shape the way things come to its awareness. And just as we talk about ‘looking’ in the visual context in the sense of focusing visual attention, and ‘looking for’ with the added element of searching, our heart/mind can also focus attention on certain aspects of a situation as well as focus attention with an element of searching.13 In the example of the student, her attention is focused on her setback even though there are other aspects of the situation that she is aware of (e.g., that her academic record prepares her for other graduate programs), and what she focuses attention on is viewed under certain modes of conceptualization (e.g., that this setback dooms her future). All these different elements—what one is aware of, what one focuses attention on, how one conceptualizes what one focuses attention on, and so forth—are interconnected parts of one’s overall view of the situation, as in the case of visual perception. That our responses to situations may appropriately be described in perceptual terms has sometimes been noted in the contemporary philosophical literature, though with a different focus, such as an emphasis on how the way one ‘perceives’ a situation can fully account for one’s action. Some describe how ‘clarity of vision’ in the way one experiences a situation can result in one’s seeing only one course of action, so that the operation of the will is like ‘obedience’ (Murdoch 1970: 38–39, 68). Others highlight the notion of salience, understood in terms of ‘seeing something as a reason for acting which silences all others’ (McDowell 1989: 103). In such situations, the more deliberative mode of action is no longer applicable, and the cognitive can no longer be separated from the volitional since one’s way of seeing the situation cannot be separated from the way one is moved (McDowell 1989: 103). That ethical progress is to a significant extent a matter of limiting one’s ‘live options’ in acting, and that one may progress to the point when only one option is open to view in certain kinds of situations, is an indisputable fact of our ethical life. My focus, though, is not on this phenomenon, nor on downplaying the ethical significance of a more deliberative mode of action. While the former mode of action describes many familiar situations, the latter, more deliberative, mode of action is not just relevant to unusual situations or challenging dilemmas. There are fairly normal circumstances in which one sees clearly the need for action (e.g., upon witnessing an act of cruelty) but is not sure what to do (e.g., directly intervene or call police). And after deciding what to do or even if one sees clearly what to do without deliberation (e.g., that one should directly intervene), one might still be unsure how best to execute it. In this way, the need for deliberation also pervades many ethically significant situations we encounter on a day-to-day basis. My focus is not on downplaying its significance, but on highlighting the ethical significance of a way of experiencing and responding to situations that takes the form of the complex package described earlier, one that might lead straightforwardly to action or might just set the framework for further deliberation.

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A main task in ethical development is to become the kind of person who reliably views situations in ethically desirable ways. I will refer to as an outlook of the person that which accounts for her pattern of responses in a certain area of life, such as those involving personal injury. While the term ‘outlook’ is neutral with regard to the nature of the responses, an ethical outlook is a relatively enduring state of the heart/mind by virtue of which one experiences and responds to situations of a certain kind consistently in an ethically desirable manner. To the extent that we describe these responses in perceptual terms, the outlook is not to be identified with a pattern of perception nor with a ‘perceptual capacity’.14 Instead, the term ‘outlook’ makes the point that this state of the heart/mind can itself be described in perceptual terms, as a more enduring way of viewing things that accounts for the pattern or makes possible the capacity. Consider again the example of discriminative bias. One can come to have sincere beliefs about the equality of all humans while the entrenched bias persists. While someone with the appropriate ethical outlook can be described as having such a belief, that belief has to permeate the whole person in a way that precludes the kind of subtle bias described earlier. One’s coming to have the relevant ethical outlook involves not just a corresponding adjustment in beliefs, but a whole reorientation of oneself, including one’s thoughts and sentiments, the way one directs attention, the way one is moved, etc., all of these being intertwined with each other. A re-orientation of this kind is familiar to us in many areas of life. It is the goal of certain educational practices such as taking young children to live for some time in a developing country or, in a more formal context, the establishment of study abroad programs. The exposure provides the student with a more experiential understanding of what she has learnt at home or in the classroom, such as what it is like to live a life of poverty or to be part of a different culture. The goal is to instill a kind of understanding that engages her more deeply and pervasively, informing her thoughts, sentiments, motivations, and so forth.15 In this way, an ethical outlook is itself a complex package having to do with the way one views things in a certain area of life. It need not refer to some enduring state of the heart/mind that one can actually attain and continue to maintain in one’s lifetime. Instead, it has to do with a direction of transformation that we should aspire to, a direction along which we can progress but without implying some kind of endpoint. And although we can speak of different ethical outlooks in relation to different areas of life, these different outlooks are often connected—e.g., someone who views personal hardships with relative equanimity is also less likely to view wrongful injury of oneself as a personal challenge. Thus, the different ethical outlooks can be regarded as different aspects of a single ethical outlook; they identify different aspects of a single state of the heart/mind that accounts for different patterns in the way one experiences and responds to situations. For the Confucians, the main ethical task is to develop and cultivate this overarching ethical outlook, which they characterize in terms of a state of ‘no self’ (see Shun 2018).

5 The idea of enlightenment There are different ways to facilitate development of ethical outlooks. Sometimes, this is not something that one consciously works toward, but just come with certain life experiences, like the kind of childhood educational experiences described earlier. And the influencing factor could be the kind of influences one is exposed to on a day-to-day basis, such as the kind of people one associates with, the kind of political dynamics one witnesses on TV, and so forth. Sometimes, one might seek to develop certain outlooks through self-conscious efforts to directly manage the operations of one’s own psychology. In Section 3, we described a variety of 30

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ways in which this can happen. It can involve, for example, invoking certain imageries in one’s mind, actively redirecting one’s attention in certain ways, or making a deliberate effort to shift to a different perspective. Sometimes, there can be an interplay between more passive and more active processes. For example, one can follow, in a more passive way, guidance from friends or teachers and, in that context, one makes active psychological efforts to follow the advice. This is often the relation between the Confucian or Chan Buddhist master and his students. Alternatively, one can make active efforts to expose oneself to experiences of certain kinds to allow oneself to be influenced, in a more passive manner, by the experiences. For example, one can seek to overcome one’s prejudicial sentiments by deliberating associating more closely with members of a minority group. Another example is the life of Siddhartha as portrayed in Herman Hesse’s novel of the same name. Siddhartha actively sought liberation from the self by joining the ascetics, then the order of the Buddha, fell back to a worldly life, till he became enlightened by the side of a river under the subtle influence of a fisherman. I just used the word ‘enlightened’ to make a specific point. In the end, despite all his active seeking, the state Siddhartha sought had to ‘come to’ him, something he could hope for but not deliberately bring about. This point is true in general of the development of an ethical outlook—whatever path one follows, success is never guaranteed. Even when one makes conscious efforts to directly manage the operations of one’s own psychology, perhaps under external guidance, one might still not come to see things in the desired manner. And when the change does come, one experiences it as a transition to clear awareness, with things ‘lighting up’, an experience conveyed in the three Chinese traditions using terms with the connotation of ‘awakening’ or ‘illumination’.16 That kind of shift in vision is well portrayed in western art and literature, as in Tolstoy’s portrayal of Ivan Ilyich’s shift in perspective toward his own death at the final moment, or Valjean’s transformation as portrayed in the musical Les Miserable. Obviously, the shift in vision need not occur in a dramatic fashion. But even when it happens gradually, it is still experienced as a shift in vision that comes to one and that one would, on looking back, describe in terms of how one has ‘come to see things clearly’. One can try to describe what that ‘enlightened’ state is like, whether as an observer or as someone in that state, and such a description can be communicated in words, even recorded in texts as a teaching. But a person does not come to be in that state through endorsing what has been communicated. As in the example of discriminative bias, one can sincerely endorse what has been communicated but still not see things in the relevant way. Linguistic communication at best inspires one to work in a certain direction, but the actual shift in vision is never guaranteed and is something that comes to one when it does come. This accounts for the emphasis in all three Chinese traditions on the limitation of linguistic communication, and also explains why presenting these traditions primarily as ‘metaphysical’ views or as theoretical accounts of certain kinds misses their fundamental insights. For all three traditions, the primary purpose of linguistic communication is to steer the audience toward the desired ethical outlook through the corresponding shift in vision, rather than to convince them to endorse certain metaphysical views or theoretical accounts. Something that looks like systematic accounts of the cosmos and the human condition do emerge in the context of intellectual debates within or across traditions; Zhu Xi, for example, writes extensively to present some such account. But even Zhu acknowledges that these accounts are of ‘secondary importance’. The truly ethical person need not have a reflective conception of such accounts and, even if they do, it is not by virtue of endorsing such accounts that they are ethical.

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6 Concluding comments In this chapter, we considered a mode of ethical reflection that focuses on practice, on making an actual difference to the way we respond to the ethical challenges that we confront on a dayto-day basis. These responses often take the form of a complex package akin to a form of perception. Ideally, we should become the kind of person who can so respond without the need to further manage our psychology. This involves our developing certain ethical outlooks, which are again akin to a form of perception, having to do with the way we view the human community, the world, and our place in the human community and the world. Compared to certain common strands in contemporary philosophical discussions, this mode of reflection approaches the questions what? and why? differently, demonstrating little interest in seeking a systematic unifying account of our ethical life, or some set of foundational considerations that can convince and motivate any human being with some supposedly ‘rational’ capacity to be ethical. If there were such considerations, the idea of ethical outlook would no longer have a central role. The ethical ideal would then be to become the kind of person who can grasp and be moved by such a set of considerations. And if grasping such considerations suffices to move one to be ethical, the question how? would no longer be prominent. By contrast, on this mode of ethical reflection, how to manage one’s psychology to properly respond to a situation and how to develop the proper kind of ethical outlooks are the central ethical tasks. Highlighting this mode of ethical reflection is crucial to a proper understanding of Asian ethical traditions. It helps counter the tendency to frame ideas from such traditions in terms of contemporary philosophical agendas and conceptions. To properly understand such a tradition, we need to start from within, mastering the language and the historical context, and engaging in close textual studies. Only after having done so do we move outward from the tradition to relate its ideas to contemporary philosophical discussions of related phenomena, taking care to avoid imposing contemporary philosophical agendas and conceptions on these ideas (see Shun 2016a). But the relevance of this alternative mode of ethical reflection goes beyond our understanding of Asian traditions. We ourselves, in our contemporary context, also have reason to engage in this mode of reflection to the extent that our reflectivity is practical in character—not primarily to understand the ethical lives of humans as an object of study from an observer’s perspective, but primarily to live a better life ourselves and to help others do the same. At the same time, our engaging in this mode of reflection does not render irrelevant the kind of ethical reflection that is currently more pervasive in contemporary moral philosophizing. While the former focuses on practice and is suited for the familiar ethical challenges that we regularly confront, the latter, which involves our stepping back to reflect on ethical issues from a more removed perspective, would be needed to cope with more radical challenges, such as drastic reconsideration of existing practices or unusual challenges posed by new technology. My proposal is not that the latter is irrelevant, only that it needs to be supplemented by the former.17 Although we presented the contrast between the two modes of ethical reflection in terms of contrasting focuses on practice and on understanding, this does not mean that the former downplays the importance of understanding, only that it conceptualizes understanding differently. The kind of ethical reflection more common in contemporary philosophizing seeks to understand our ethical lives as an object of study, approaching it from an observer perspective as in other kinds of academic inquiry. The search for this kind of intellectual understanding often emphasizes qualities such as conceptual clarity, analytic rigor, reasoning understood in terms of evidence and argumentation, and so forth. The alternative mode of ethical reflection still values such qualities—after all, we do not want our reflection to be vague and confused in a way that does not contribute to practice. But it engages in such exercises as conceptual analysis or 32

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argumentation only to the extent that they have a practical relevance. There is no presumption that we do not really understand a certain phenomenon unless we can spell out its nature in very articulate terms; we engage in articulation only when it serves a practical purpose. Instead, the understanding it seeks is guided by the practical goal of ethical progress. We understand an ethical proposal better not through more fine-grained analysis of concepts or more argumentative details, but through personally resonating with it and being moved to live accordingly. To the extent that we do not live up to that proposal, or do so only reluctantly, our understanding is still shallow. There is genuine understanding only if we can resonate with it, personally experience its validity, and shape our whole person accordingly.18 The kind of understanding involved is experiential understanding. Experiential understanding can still involve a deeply reflective view of the ethical life. Having such a reflective view need not involve one’s being directly motivated by it, and so there is no theoretical conflict between one’s having such a reflective view and the motivations one should ideally have in living the ethical life (see Shun 1996, 2015b). The Confucians are concerned not with such a theoretical conflict, but with the potential for practical conflict. In having such a reflective view, one should not be preoccupied with it in such a way that it misdirects one’s attention, away from the things that should ideally be the objects of one’s ethical concern. Later Confucian thinkers such as Zhu Xi and Wang Yangming differ in the extent to which they see a potential practical conflict, resulting in differing willingness to engage in elaborate and reflective discourse on the ethical life. Whichever position one takes, there is agreement that, even if having a more articulate reflective view of the ethical life need not lead to a misdirection of attention, having such a reflective view is not part of what it is to live that way of life. Finally, let us consider the implications of this discussion for contemporary teaching and learning. Much of what transpires in the present-day philosophy curriculum is the teaching and learning of reflective ethics, involving our reflecting on the ethical lives of humans from a more removed perspective. While this kind of reflectivity is important for certain practical contexts, such as formulating social policies or critiquing problematic social practices, it needs supplementation by a different kind of reflectivity that focuses on practice and that pertains to the familiar ethical challenges that we encounter on a daily basis. The latter characterizes reflective ethical teaching and learning, an activity quite different from what is commonly found in the present-day classroom. For this kind of teaching to be effective, we need to relate what we teach to the actual ethical experiences of students, including not just their personal experiences, but experiences of others they learn about through association, through literature and film, or through the concrete human situations recorded in history or depicted in current affairs. We invite the students to see if what they are now learning resonates with their actual experiences, whether it is something they are inspired to practice in their actual lives, and whether they continue to resonate with what they have learnt as they practice it. What we teach, and what we hope they can learn, is experiential understanding. While we do invite students to read and reflect on written materials that embody certain ethical insights, we also teach them to read beyond the words to get at these insights, personally experience and practice them to ensure that they do indeed resonate with their own experiences. In doing so, we do not ask them to evaluate ideas critically in the way that is often done in the philosophy curriculum, but the learning is neither passive nor mechanical. As the Confucian thinkers emphasize, the students should not agree with what they have read, even if the materials are supposed to record the past insights of the sages, unless they can grasp and resonate with such insights. The students should engage in ‘doubting’—that is, raise doubts if one cannot resonate with what has been read, asking whether 33

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one might have misunderstood the texts and missed the real insights, or whether what has been recorded are indeed not genuine ethical insights. One raises doubts not for the sake of constantly stepping back and challenging what has been conveyed, but in order to ensure that what have been recorded are genuine ethical insights that one can benefit from. This mode of reflective ethical teaching and learning also has implications for higher education as such. It emphasizes the development of certain ethical outlooks, which concern the way one views the human community, the world, and one’s place in the human community and the world. To help the student develop such outlooks, we need to help them build a broad perspective through teaching them history, literature, and a whole range of humanistic and scientific subject matters. We teach them how to think about these subject matters in a way that enables them to truly digest what they have learnt and make it part of themselves, and also how to connect what they have learnt into a broader perspective on humans and on the world. These two dimensions of higher education have been emphasized by John Henry Newman as essential to what he describes as the ‘growth of the mind’, a main goal of university education. Newman does not discuss their ethical relevance, but the Confucians would embed them in a learning process that has two other dimensions with explicit ethical relevance. One comes early on, having to do with inspiring the student who has just reached adulthood to form lofty aspirations as to how she can contribute to the betterment of the human community and the world. The other builds on the other three dimensions, and has to do with incorporating the broad world view that one has learnt into one’s whole person and one’s aspirations, so that it informs one’s ethical cultivation of oneself as well as one’s endeavours in the service of humankind. This, from the Confucian perspective, would be the ultimate goal of what we now refer to as higher education.19

Notes 1 These two features have been noted by contemporary Chinese scholars, who describe Chinese traditions as a ‘learning for living’ (sheng mng de xue wen) that emphasizes the ‘spiritual state of the heart/ mind’ (xin ling jing jie). 2 This relates to the common observation that professors of ethics are not necessarily more ethical compared to professors of other subjects. 3 As exemplified in Mencius’ dialogues with rulers, which often invoke considerations that move a ruler but not a general audience (e.g., gaining allegiance of the people). 4 A strategy often used by Mozi ( fifth century B.C.), who opposes Confucian teachings. 5 A strategy often used by Mencius. 6 Such as the legendary sage kings often cited by the Confucians. 7 That our responses are directed primarily to situations is conveyed in the pre-modern Chinese language in terms of how humans are ‘affected by’ (gan) and ‘respond to’ (ying) ‘affairs’ (shi) that they encounter. 8 Xin in Chinese, kokoro in Japanese. 9 I owe this example to some writing by Peter Winch, but can no longer trace the source. 10 Early Chinese texts, such as the Odes (an ancient collection of poems) and the Analects of Confucius, are filled with examples of the ‘as if’ (ru) mentality. 11 The shifting of perspective is highlighted in the Zhuangzi as a route to self-transformation. 12 Such as the way McDowell (1989) argues against the presumption of a distinction between the cognitive and the volitional. 13 These operations of the heart/mind are highlighted in Confucian moral psychology. Indeed, in traditional Chinese thought, the heart/mind is itself viewed as an organ like the sense organs; what distinguishes it from the latter is its distinctive modes of operation, rather than its being a ‘mental’ entity as distinct from a ‘physical’ entity. 14 Unlike McDowell who identifies virtue with a sensitivity which is ‘a sort of perceptual capacity’ (McDowell 1989: 87–89).

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Practice and the centrality of outlook 15 All three Chinese traditions emphasize an experiential form of understanding that is akin to perception, presenting the highest form of zhi, the term often translated as ‘understanding’ or ‘knowledge’, as a matter of ming, a term with the connotation of illumination and clarity of sight. 16 Jue and wu (often translated as ‘awakening’) as well as ming (often translated as ‘bright’ or ‘clear’). 17 Oakeshott (1989) makes a similar point about the complementary nature of the two forms of moral life he distinguishes. 18 A point emphasized by all Confucians, and particularly highlighted by Zhu Xi in the context of discussing the way to read the classics. 19 See Shun (2016b) which also contains references to Newman’s ideas on higher education.

References McDowell, J. (1989) Virtue and Reason, in S. G. Clarke and E. Simpson (eds), Anti-Theory in Ethics and Moral Conservatism, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. 87–109. Murdoch, I. (1970) The Sovereignty of Good, London and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Oakeshott, M. (1989) The Tower of Babel, in S. G. Clarke and E. Simpson (eds), Anti-Theory in Ethics and Moral Conservatism, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. 185–203. Shun, K. (1996) Ideal Motivations and Reflective Understanding, American Philosophy Quarterly 33: 91–104. Shun, K. (2015a) On Anger—An Essay in Confucian Moral Psychology, in D. Jones and H. Jinli, (eds), Rethinking Zhu Xi: Emerging Patterns within the Supreme Polarity, Albany, NY: University of New York Press. 299–324 Shun, K. (2015b) Ethical Self-Commitment and Ethical Self-Indulgence, in Br. Bruya, (ed.), Philosophical Challenge from China, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 183–203. Shun, K. (2016a) Studying Confucian Ethics from the Inside Out, Dao 15.4: 511–532. Shun, K. (2016b) Confucian Learning and Liberal Education, Journal of East-West Thought 6.2: 5–21 Shun, K. (2018) On the Idea of “No Self”, Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 92: 78–107. Shun, K. (Forthcoming a) Ming and Acceptance, in Xiao, Yang (ed.), Dao Companion to the Philosophy of Mencius, Dordrecht: Springer. Shun, K. (Forthcoming b) Zhu Xi and the Idea of One Body, in Ng, Kai-chiu and Huang, Yong (eds), Dao Companion to the Philosophy of Zhu Xi, Dordrecht: Springer.

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3 THINKING, THEORIZING AND THEORIA Stephen Clark

1 Practical thinking ‘Thinking’, it is commonly supposed is what all and only properly human beings do, and should somehow learn to do better. Sometimes this judgment is elevated into a declaration that humanity alone of mortal animals has any share in the divine. This animal—foreseeing, sagacious, manifold, sharp, mindful, filled with reason and judgment–that we call man, has been begotten by the supreme god in a sort of magnificent condition. For it alone, of all the kinds and natures of animate beings, has a share in reason and reflection, in which all the others have no part. Moreover, what is more divine than reason–I will not say in man but in the entire heaven and earth? (Cicero De Legibus 1.22) ‘Animals’, it is assumed, don’t think or reason or correct their own first judgments. They don’t wonder if they are doing the ‘right thing’, but rather act in fear or in desire, according to preset, ‘instinctual’ patterns of behaviour. Even humanists who doubt our ‘divinity’ almost all assume that, somehow, we are different from all other animals, despite their agreement with current biological theory, according to which humanity is not a ‘natural kind’, but rather a relatively isolated set of interbreeding populations whose common ancestors lived, perhaps, some two hundred thousand years ago. It seems to be true that all of us modern human beings are more closely related (and so more nearly homogeneous) than most other primate groups: our line passed through a bottleneck of some sort only a few thousand years ago, when there were no more than a few thousand of our species living, and all in the same region. But it also seems clear that there have been other hominin species (and may yet be again), and that whatever particular talents, habits and liabilities we possess are also to be found, in different degrees and with different associations, in other animal lines. But it is difficult to shake free of the stereotypes. We seek to discover what matters for our humanity by identifying what we probably do not share with others, even if that requires us to rethink the nature of those capacities or patterns. Because we are certain that ‘animals’ can’t talk we must carefully define how ‘talking’ differs from communicating. Because we are certain that they cannot think we may begin to wonder whether they can even have likes or dislikes (which would require 36

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them to have a ‘rational’ preference for one possibility over another). Even Stoic philosophers, while denying that animals could have any real share in ‘reason’, nonetheless acknowledged that–for example–hunting dogs could be seen, as it were, to reason syllogistically: ‘either my quarry went this way, or this way, or this way. But neither this way, nor this way. Therefore this way’.1 But this requires, the Stoics thought, no serious understanding of the rules of logic, nor any further check to ensure that mistakes aren’t made. This couldn’t strictly be reasoning, because there was (they thought) no room in the dog’s ‘thinking’ for the thought that he might be wrong, that the options were perhaps not exhausted merely by two ways, even that the prey might have some stratagems of its own. They don’t really calculate, any more than squirrels as they leap from branch to branch. Squirrels and dogs don’t need to think. And neither do really skilled human agents! We have not fully mastered any skill—driving a car or dancing or reciting poetry—until we can exercise it without thinking: so perhaps ‘thinking’ is rather a sign of being unprepared for life than an indication of our own superiority. When we ask ourselves how best to live, how we might have a life worth living, Aristotle suggested that human beings, or at least those human beings who asked themselves the question, were, exactly, creatures who needed to ask the question. Human life is a life ‘according to reason’, a life deliberately chosen, whatever its precise content (Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics 1.1098a3–5). This is not to say that we always have such deliberate reasons: all of us may sometimes do what we do spontaneously, out of some immediate impulse of desire or fear; some creatures of human origin—so Aristotle supposed—were incapable of reasoned action: children, barbarians or ‘natural slaves’ (see Clark 1985). Once the question, how best to live, has been raised, however, we cannot easily escape it, and had better try to discover what we need to answer it successfully. How shall we choose what to do, and what characters and talents will best support our choices? The first step may be simply to form habits to prevent merely impulsive behaviour. We may need to impose some slight delay on what we feel ourselves inclined to do: not to utter or email the witty or hurtful retort, for example, before we have had time to reconsider its effects. We may need to notice our own most common ‘native’ responses, whether to flee or fight, to seize or let go, to submit or disobey, and consciously do the opposite for a while, until each option is as ‘natural’ as the other. These ‘ethical’ virtues, acquired through education and personal practice, are at least a likely basis for managing our choices better, in such a way that we may eventually look back without too many regrets. Acquiring notionally better habits can’t be the sole solution: there may be an advantage in not always impulsively running away or fighting, but someone who did one or the other merely as the mood took him, or the toss of a coin, would hardly be best placed to make the ‘right’ decision. We need to have the space, the talent, the inclination, to think about what we are doing, in whatever context: to consider the likely effects for ourselves and others, to consider how our actions will be perceived by others, to consider whether we would ourselves approve or disapprove of any other who acted as we might ourselves, to wonder whether we would be satisfied by ‘success’. If we are compelled to have reasons for what we do, they need to be ‘good’ reasons. We need to be able to ‘justify’ our behaviour, to show that we are acting as ‘sensible’ people would. Our reasons must be ones that ‘sensible’ people can acknowledge and endorse, in our particular context, and in the light of what is reckoned the better sort of life. Nor is it enough to agree that our acts were aimed at some genuine good result, if we thereby lost some greater advantage: we might be tempted to betray a friend to achieve an immediate good, but such disloyalty will lose us friends; we might be glad to ‘succeed’ as an entrepreneur or a politician, but learn to regret our isolation, our insincerity or the eventual cost of failure. We need, in short, to have some sense of proper priorities: to be loved is better than to be feared, and to have someone to love is better even than being loved (Magna Moralia 1210b5–7), and 37

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being loved is better than having sex (so Aristotle assured us: Prior Analytics 68a39–41). Intimate friendship is a good that tyrants and other psychopaths cannot easily enjoy. But even they still need companions: none of us can, realistically, survive as solitaries, without the support of our families, neighbours, fellow citizens and supportive workers. None of us, for that matter, can survive, let alone live well, without the ongoing activity of the whole terrestrial biosphere. Seeking only ‘our own’ good, without considering the good of those wholes of which we are, willingly or unwillingly, a part, is an obviously suicidal strategy. The good life, as Aristotle said, must be one that is also good for friends and family and the wider world: ‘no-one would choose to have all good things by himself, for man is social and born to living-together’ (Nicomachean Ethics 9.1169b17–19). To sort out our priorities we need to ask ourselves what we would sensibly surrender for what gain. Obviously, we would all rather have everything we seriously want—but to make that our goal would be absurd: all choices have their costs, and we are all also subject to the wheel of fortune. It may even be self-contradictory, as one thing we probably want is to have (so far) unfulfilled desires! If we are to have some chance of ‘living well’ we must identify something that it is possible to achieve, and that will, by itself, make our actual life worth living even if there might be some better life with the addition of some gift of fortune (so Nicomachean Ethics 1.1097b16–20). So what might such an advantage amount to? Aristotle’s answer was that the best life was one lived in accordance with virtue, and—if there are many virtues—in accordance with the best and most complete (Nicomachean Ethics 1.1098a16–18). That life at least involves us in the chore or happiness of thinking, and the consequent need to correct our ethical and epistemic failings. His own judgment about the most significant goal to pursue is one to which I shall return: namely, that we need above all to realize what is unchangeably and reliably the case. Whether or not he was right, it remains clear that we are all condemned to having to make these choices, assess our priorities, engage others in the conversation, and learn as much as we can about the context of our acts. We need to accept that we might be mistaken, as a necessary step to learning better! Refutation is the greatest and chiefest of purifications, and he who has not been refuted, though he be the Great King himself, is in an awful state of impurity; he is uninstructed and deformed in those things in which he who would be truly blessed ought to be fairest and purest. (Plato Sophist 227c)2 It may not be possible wholly to formalize the reasoning required to make those decisions: we need rules that can bend, as it were, to fit the circumstances (Nicomachean Ethics 5.1137b27–32), and cannot escape the necessity, and peril, of personal present judgment. There are, so Aristotle supposes, people who fail to manage, or even to desire, this condition, and so have no share in the sort of life that only creatures who can choose may manage: neither slaves nor children have any share in eudaimonia, the life well-lived (Politics 3.1289a32–40). Slaves—or those born to be slavish—may be either savages in disposition, like the northern tribes (he thought) or ‘heathen’, lazily submissive to the commands of a tyrannical authority (like the subjects of the eastern empires). Neither can manage to make up their own minds, and follow their personal conscience. Neither, it seems, have any conception of a world wider than their immediate likes and dislikes. Like Aristotle, we can complement ourselves in managing the middle way, remembering that there is indeed a world, that there are very many subjective worlds, outside our own, and choosing those paths that can be consciously endorsed in sensible conversation. But perhaps it is time, exactly because we need to accept our own fallibility, to question our conscious superiority over those other creatures (both human and non-human) who manage 38

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their lives, as Plotinus pointed out, quite well without recourse to ‘reason’ (Plotinus I.4[46].2.35–43). On the one hand, they follow patterns of behaviour, whether genetic or social, that have served their predecessors well enough for generations: why is it that we ‘properly human’ creatures (as we think) need any other guide? Do we in fact have any other guide than the predispositions, natural and social goals, and habitual discriminations that others use ‘unthinkingly’? Why do we need to know what those predispositions, goals and discriminations are? What gain is there in questioning them, as if we could somehow make up new ways of life and rules for living from nothing? When antient [sic] opinions and rules of life are taken away, the loss cannot possibly be estimated. From that moment we have no compass to govern us; nor can we know distinctly to what port we steer. (Burke 1968: 172) Popular advice to children, students, citizens that they should learn ‘to think for themselves’ may sometimes be really bad advice! Would we happily advise them all to calculate for themselves, or rather to consult accountants, or to self-diagnose, rather than consult a medic? And even amateur calculation or self-diagnosis may be a safer enterprise than ‘thinking’ (that is, most often, daydreaming, rationalizing or reciting half-remembered stories). Even or especially the Very Clever, or those who think that they are Very Clever, should perhaps be warned away from relying on their own ‘reasoning’ about what is or should be. Notoriously, the Very Clever are very apt to rationalize their own desires (see Clark 2016). But perhaps we must question those ‘antient opinions’ precisely because we now know more about the wider world, and about our own biology and history? Or at least our picture of the world and of ourselves is larger and more detailed than, it seems, our ancestors enjoyed. They were not entirely wrong, for example, to employ blood-letting as a device against fever—but that would not nowadays be sound medical practice in any but a small proportion of cases.3 Similarly, we can no longer easily suppose that humans of a different colour or physiognomy are radically different in mental or moral capacities—though exactly this idea was once dictated by respected ‘scientists’ and philosophers on the basis of their own ‘reasoned’ account of things.4 They might have been better advised to rely on more fundamental sentiments of shared humanity—and so, perhaps, might we. Is it actually true that human beings can know more about the world and about themselves than non-human creatures who must (let us suppose) rely on sense alone? That indeed is what it feels comforting to think—and we should therefore, ‘rationally’, be ready to question it. John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, put the case against us in his ‘Satire against Reason and Mankind’ (Wilmot 2013: 52–53): Were I (who to my cost already am One of those strange, prodigious creatures, man) A spirit free to choose, for my own share What case of flesh and blood I pleased to wear, I’d be a dog, a monkey, or a bear, Or anything but that vain animal, Who is so proud of being rational. The senses are too gross, and he’ll contrive A sixth, to contradict the other five, And before certain instinct, will prefer 39

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Reason, which fifty times for one does err; Reason, an ignis fatuus of the mind, Which, leaving light of nature, sense, behind, Pathless and dangerous wand’ring ways it takes Through error’s fenny bogs and thorny brakes. Philo of Alexandria had a similarly sour view of our ‘intelligence’: Even now in this life, we are the ruled rather than the rulers, known rather than knowing. Is my mind my own possession? That parent of false conjectures, that purveyor of delusion, the delirious, the fatuous, and in frenzy or senility proved to be the very negation of mind.5 Why then should powers of ‘reasoning’ be considered proof of our superiority, our agreement with the fundamental reason of all things? As Hume enquired in the voice of his own ‘Philo’, with a wider implication than is usually remembered: ‘What peculiar privilege has this little agitation of the brain which we call thought, that we must thus make it the model of the whole universe?’ (Hume 1976: 168). Our senses indeed are far inferior to those of other animals. If we are to know, or reasonably to believe, anything beyond our immediate vision, we must rely on testimony or uneasy inference. But consider instead how ordinary dogs must perceive their world: they can detect the nature, distance and direction of particular objects for miles around. They can even recognize where their target has been. Trained dogs don’t just notice a smell. They notice the change in a smell over time. The concentration of an odor [sic] left on the ground by, say, a running footprint, diminishes with every second that passes. In just two seconds, a runner may have made four or five footprints: enough for a trained tracker to tell the direction that he ran based just on the differences in the odor emanating from the first and fifth print. The track you left as you exited the room has more smell in it than the one right before it; thus your path is reconstructed. Scent marks time. (Horowitz 2009: 78)6 In other words, they are directly acquainted with an immensely larger world than we can manage unassisted, and acquainted moreover with its dynamic being. The same seems to be true for other creatures, including elephants, whales and moths, whose detailed knowledge of where to find what they might need serves them at least as well as any human memory or social tradition. Time past and time future are both sensually contained in time present! Our ‘reasoning’ abilities, in brief, are ways of extrapolating, more or less persuasively, from what we sense directly to what we do not sense. We need them because our senses are much less extensive than those of many non-humans. It is possible that these abilities have often been needed also because our ancestors were faced with rapidly changing circumstances: they were themselves nomadic, and the global climate was unstable. They needed to learn to distinguish what seemed obvious to them from what would prove to be really ‘true’. They needed to guess about the future more often than simply to sense what was and had been obvious. ‘Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence [that is, no ‘reasoning’] where there is no need of change’ (Wells 1970: 86). On

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the other hand, other species also survived their times, without the supposed advantages of our ‘intelligence’.

2 Speculative thinking And yet, we still have hope. According to Lovejoy, as I have remarked on other occasions, ‘the primary and most universal faith of man [is] his inexpugnable realism, his twofold belief that he is on the one hand in the midst of realities which are not himself nor mere obsequious shadows of himself, a world which transcends the narrow confines of his own transient being; and on the other hand that he can himself somehow read beyond those confines and bring those external existences within the compass of his own life yet without annulment of their transcendence’ (Lovejoy 1930: 14). There is more to our life than simply making do, in ways that (as we suppose, non-rational) animals can often more easily and profitably manage. We may perhaps allow ourselves to believe, or at least to entertain the notion, that we can discover patterns in what happens, patterns and inner causes that transcend the mere succession of sensibilia, even the sensibilia of our more sensitive kindred. So also Augustine: ‘this great and wonderful instinct for knowledge is found in no mortal creatures apart from man. For, though some animals are able to regard this world’s light with far sharper eyes than we have, they cannot attain to that incorporeal light with which our mind is somehow irradiated, so that we can judge all things’ (Augustine 1998: 486 [11.27]). It is not enough simply to sense what is happening or has happened all around: our hope is to discover why it happens, or on what principles. We need to ‘speculate’: that is, to hope to mirror the real workings of the larger world. Early astronomers, for example, had no more than their personal and cultural memory to assist them in determining when this or that bright spot of light would move across the darkened sky, very much as the prisoners of Plato’s Cave could do no more than guess the order in which shadows passed (see Plato Republic 7.529be). Astronomers were helped, eventually, by imagining that these bright spots were ‘really’ moving bodies, bound together in a complex system—or rather, were shadows or images of such moving bodies. One of the most surprising, serendipitous, discoveries of recent years has been the Antikythera Mechanism—in effect a sophisticated astrolabe, of many interlocking wheels, by which ancient astronomers were able to predict eclipses. The use of epicyclic spheres to explain planetary motion may have been extrapolated from the interlocking gears of such devices: In other words, epicycles were not a philosophical innovation but a mechanical one. Once Greek astronomers realized how well epicyclic gearing in devices such as the Antikythera mechanism replicated the cyclic variations of celestial bodies, they could have incorporated the concept into their own geometrical models of the cosmos. (Marchant 2010) The merely physical model, even in the more refined and accurate versions of post-Newtonian cosmology, is still less than self-explanatory. Just as the visible lights are merely echoes or shadows of the motion of illuminated bodies, so those motions themselves are embodiments of an entirely ‘mathematical’ reality: an n-dimensional mathematical figure to be grasped only by intellect (see Tegmark 2014: 254–70). It is in understanding these unchanging truths that human ‘reason’ is distinguished from whatever talents the non-human have. Or so, at least, we have often supposed. Practical reason, of the kind that I have already sketched, is needed if we are to manage our lives, and prioritize our various goals in the absence of ‘certain instinct’. On Aristotle’s account, 41

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remember, the best life is the one lived in accordance with virtue, and (if there are many virtues) in accordance with the best and most complete, which we would choose to exercise in preference to any other. It may seem odd to suggest that ‘theoretical reason’, sophia, is to be preferred. Should not we aim to be courageous, compassionate, self-possessed and courteous (and so forth) rather than simply ‘clever’? ‘We ought to fly away from earth to heaven as quickly as we can; and to fly away means to become like God, as far as this is possible; and to become like him, means to become holy, just, and wise’, so Socrates insists to Theaetetus (Plato Theaetetus 176a). But the exercise of ‘practical’ virtues cannot be ‘godlike’: what need have gods for that (Nicomachean Ethics 10.1178b7–18)? Or as Plotinus put the point: a truly virtuous person (in the ‘practical’ sense) would not want to have to exercise her virtue, any more than a skilled doctor wants to have the occasion to heal wounds or illness (Plotinus VI.8[39].5.13–21). On the one hand, ‘practical’ reasoning will be inane or harmful if it rests (like the general use of bloodletting as a remedy for fever) on mistaken notions of what is the case; on the other, we should prefer to know the truth even if we cannot put that knowledge to immediate use. Practical virtues are needed to endure or to amend the perils of this mortal life, but the discovery and understanding of fundamental truth is entirely to be wished. Such truths are not merely neutral, but rather excite our admiration, even our worship. We cannot prefer the doing of good to recognizing and enjoying it, cannot prefer to make ‘many and beautiful things’ (which is what Socrates and Euthyphro agree is what the gods want of us: Plato Euthyphro 13b–14b) at the expense of not acknowledging the beauties that already are. How indeed could we hope to do good or make beauty if we did not already recognize and admire the good and beautiful? How can we hope to accomplish anything if we do not understand the workings of the world? Confronted by the choice, we must prefer to understand without acting than to act without understanding. But what does this sort of theorizing amount to? Comparing ourselves, once again, to what we know or suspect of ‘animals’ we may notice that some of the latter do not need to do more than respond to particular stimuli, and have no need even to notice, let alone appreciate, what else may be happening in the world. The sheep tick may rest quietly on a grass stalk for up to eighteen years until butyric acid triggers a leap that may land upon a sheep. Whether it even experiences the acid scent we do not know. Other and more ‘sophisticated’ creatures have much fuller, richer sensoria (as I have already indicated). Do any of them imagine a wider world than even they can sense? Clearly we can: we can notice that other creatures can sense things we can’t, and begin to form hypotheses about light that is invisible to us, sounds that are inaudible, scents and tastes and feelings beyond our range. We may, naively, speak of how things ‘looked’ before there were any hominins to perceive them, or even before there was any sentient experience at all—but of course things did not then ‘look’ like anything we now perceive. Let every soul first consider this, that it made all living things itself, breathing life into them … Let it look at the great soul, being itself another soul which is no small one, which has become worthy to look by being freed from deceit and the things that have bewitched the other souls, and is established in quietude. Let not only its encompassing body and the body’s raging sea be quiet, but all its environment: the earth quiet, and the sea and air quiet, and the heaven itself at peace. Into this heaven at rest let it imagine soul as if flowing in from outside, pouring in and entering it everywhere and illuminating it: as the rays of the sun light up a dark cloud, and make it shine and give it a golden look, so soul entering into the body of heaven gives it life and gives it immortality and wakes what lies inert … Before soul it was a dead body, earth and water, or rather the darkness of matter and non-existence, and ‘what the gods hate’, as a poet says. (Plotinus V.1[10].2.1.13–23; 26–28, quoting the Homeric description of Hades, in Iliad 20.65)7 42

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This truism casts doubt on simple pictures of ‘the age of the dinosaurs’ (and such like), in which exactly the sensibilia that we perceive were somehow present before there was even any hominin intelligence. What things looked like then we have no idea, as we have no idea what it was like to be any particular sort of dinosaur! Before there was any sentient experience at all things ‘looked’ like nothing whatsoever—and yet, we are persuaded, somehow existed as potential objects of intellectual intuition, irrespective of the infinitely many ways that they might be present in whatever lately evolved sensorium. All that we can hope to say truly about those events and objects is contained in mathematical discourse about things we cannot ourselves imagine. So is the exercise of intellectual virtue an exercise in abstract imagination, guided but not determined by acknowledged fantasies? And why should this exercise ever be veridical, or be trusted beyond its immediate usefulness, either in accommodating what we suspect about other sentient life or simply giving us a common story to remember? The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics is one of the strangest mysteries (as Wigner 1960), and an argument for some non-Darwinian influence on human life.8 Normally, it is accepted in a pure act of faith, an unthinking denial of ‘Darwin’s Doubt’.9 It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all. If you are merely a sceptic, you must sooner or later ask yourself the question, ‘Why should anything go right; even observation and deduction? Why should good logic not be as misleading as bad logic? They are both movements in the brain of a bewildered ape’. (Chesterton 2011: 20–21) Alternatively, we might prefer to abandon the idea that such mathematical reasoning is ever more than fantasy—and its strange effectiveness (so far) a mixture of coincidence and selective reasoning. Is there much to choose between modern astronomical fantasies concerning Black Holes, Dark Matter, Dark Energy and the Multiverse and the more obviously imaginative fantasies that enthralled our ancestors? Is even mathematical reasoning anything more than a play with words? We may certainly hope so—and have some assurance that we are dealing with realities rather than fictions just because mathematical notions fit together so well, and so unexpectedly.10

3 The dance of immortal love One further twist in the story about ‘thinking’ is to reconsider what the objects of the exercise of intellectual virtue might be, and what it might be like to live a life like that. One must not suppose that the gods and the ‘exceedingly blessed spectators’ in the higher world contemplate propositions (axiomata), but all the Forms we speak about are beautiful images in that world, of the kind which someone imagined to exist in the soul of the wise man, images not painted but real. This is why the ancients said that the Ideas were realities and substances. The wise men of Egypt, I think, also understood this, either by scientific (akribes) or innate (sumphute) knowledge, and when they wished to signify something wisely, did not use the forms of letters which follow the order of words and propositions (logoi and protaseis) and imitate sounds and the enunciations of philosophical statements (prophoras axiomaton), but by drawing images and inscribing in their temples one particular image of each particular thing, they manifested the non-discursiveness of the intelligible world, that is, that every image is 43

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a kind of knowledge and wisdom and is a subject of statements, all together in one, and not discourse (dianoesis) or deliberation (bouleusis). (Plotinus V.8[31].5f, citing Plato, Symposium 215b; see also Plotinus IV.3[27].11) Platonists like Plotinus were persuaded that the exercise of intellectual virtue was not directed at propositions, not even mathematical propositions, but rather at really existing presences of the same sort, it seems, as appeared in more ancient cosmology. Plotinus’s divine mind is not just a mind knowing a lot of eternal objects. It is an organic living community of interpenetrating beings which are at once Forms and intelligences, all ‘awake and alive’, in which every part thinks and therefore is the whole; so that all are one mind and yet each retains its distinct individuality without which the whole would be impoverished. And this mind-world is the region where our own mind, illumined by the divine intellect finds its true self and lives its own life, its proper home and the penultimate stage on its journey, from which it is taken up to union with the Good. (Armstrong and Markus 1960: 27) This community is hierarchical: the higher ‘intelligences’ are, in effect, the angels and archangels of ps-Dionysius’ cosmology, amongst whom we may ourselves find a place, and from which we are descended. Even before this coming to be we were there, men [anthropoi] who were different, and some of us even gods, pure souls and intellect united with the whole of reality; we were parts of the intelligible, not marked off or cut off but belonging to the whole; and we are not cut off even now. (Plotinus VI.4[22].14.18–20) The practice of intellectual virtue, in short, is the effort to remember and to wake up to our life amongst the gods. Plotinus at least did not insist that only human beings had this privilege, even if it is in this present ‘human’ life that we have a particular opportunity to re-ascend. The prospect may be more than we can easily imagine, or endure, and Newman was perhaps a little unkind in his judgment that [some philosophers] sit at home, and reach forward to distances which astonish us; but they hit without grasping, and are sometimes as confident about shadows as about realities. They have worked out by a calculation the lie of a country which they never saw, and mapped it by means of a gazetteer; and, like blind men, though they can put a stranger on his way, they cannot walk straight themselves, and do not feel it quite their business to walk at all. (Newman 1903: 93–94) Plotinus and his followers at least had some hope that we might join or rejoin ‘the dance of immortal love’11 through the exercise of a spiritual rather than a merely ‘theoretical’ virtue (in the modern sense). If we cannot ourselves manage the ascent that our predecessors have envisaged maybe we must indeed be content to ‘map out’ what we have not seen, by cautious extrapolations and experimental checks. And maybe those of us, human or otherwise, who are content to relax upon ‘certain instinct’ and ancestral fantasies may survive as well in the world 44

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we cannot grasp as speculative cosmologists and would-be mystics. Maybe we should be willing to rely a little more on what Minos, or other supposed companions of the gods, have offered us as echoes or imitations of the divine: the simple rules of human decency (see Plotinus VI.9[9].7.23–26). Maybe ‘thinking’—or at any rate practical or discursive thinking—is not as powerful or as important as we might wish—and we shall live better once we can manage without it!

Notes 1 Chrysippus, according to Sextus Empiricus Outlines of Pyrrhonism 1.69 (Long and Sedley 1987: vol. 1, 216 [36E]). The story has often been repeated by philosophers (and others: Horowitz 2009: 210). Dogs do seem to follow that logic, unless other factors affect them: ‘Show your dog a ball, then conceal it from him while you place it under one of two overturned cups. Faced with the cups, and assuming he can’t smell it out, a dog will look under either cup at random: a reasonable approach when he has nothing to go on. Lift one cup to reveal a peek of the ball underneath, and you won’t be surprised that when allowed to search, your dog will have no trouble looking under that cup. But give a peek under the cup holding nothing, and researchers found that dogs suddenly lose their logic. They search first under the empty cup. … When experimenters handle both cups even when showing the dog the empty one, dogs regain their heads. They see the empty cup, and by deduction search under the other cup, which holds the hidden ball’. 2 On the further history of this trope, see Boyle (2002). 3 It is still the treatment of choice for victims of hemochromatosis, a genetic disease endemic in Europe that involves the abnormal retention of iron, and for some other conditions: for example, metabolic syndrome—‘an increasingly prevalent but poorly understood clinical condition characterized by insulin resistance, glucose intolerance, dyslipidemia, hypertension, and obesity’: see Michelson (2012). 4 According to Darwin (1981: vol. 2, 388), ‘The Negro and the European are so distinct that if specimens had been brought to a naturalist without any further information, they would undoubtedly have been considered by him as good and distinct species’. He also expected that ‘savage’ humans and the more advanced varieties of ape would soon be exterminated, and the gap between the truly human (the ‘Caucasian’) and the animal (such as the baboon) would therefore be much wider than at present (Darwin 1981: vol. 1, 201). See Black (2003) for a detailed account of the ‘experts’, who imprisoned, sterilized and castrated people they deemed ‘unfit’, in defiance of law, the American Constitution and ordinary decency. 5 Philo of Alexandria ‘On Cherubim’ 114f (1926–62: vol. 2, 77). 6 See also Horowitz (2009: 254–55): ‘Smell tells time. The past is represented by smells that have weakened, or deteriorated, or been covered. Odors are less strong over time, so strength indicates newness; weakness, age. The future is smelled on the breeze that brings air from the place you’re headed. By contrast, we visual creatures seem to look mostly in the present. The dogs’ olfactory window of what is “present” is larger than our visual one, including not just the scene currently happening, but also a snatch of the just happened and the up-ahead. The present has a shadow of the past and a ring of the future in it’. 7 All translations of Plotinus’ Enneads are by A. H. Armstrong (Plotinus 1966–88). 8 ‘The objective structure of the universe and the intellectual structure of the human being coincide; the subjective reason and the objectified reason in nature are identical. In the end it is “one” reason that links both and invites us to look to a unique creative Intelligence’: Benedict XVI to Archbishop Rino Fisichella, on the occasion of the international congress ‘From Galileo’s Telescope to Evolutionary Cosmology’ (November 30 to December 2, 2009), http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/ messages/pont-messages/2009/documents/hf_ben-xvi_mes_20091126_fisichella-telescopio_en.html). 9 ‘With me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which have been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or are at all trustworthy. Would anyone trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind? (Darwin 1887: vol. 1, 315–16). 10 One relatively intelligible example is Euler’s ‘beautiful equation’, linking two irrational and one imaginary numbers: eiπ + 1 = 0 (see Nahin 2006).

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Stephen Clark 11 At least according to Porphyry’s account of the Delphic Oracle’s judgement on Plotinus: Porphyry Life of Plotinus 22.55–56 (Plotinus 1966–88, vol. 1: 68).

References Augustine (1998) City of God, R. W. Dyson (trans.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Armstrong, A. H. and R. A. Markus (1960) Christian Faith and Greek Philosophy, London: Darton, Longman and Todd. Black, Edwin (2003) War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race, New York: Four Walls Eight Windows. Burke, Edmund (1968 [1790]) Reflections on the Revolution in France, Conor Cruise O’Brien (ed.), London: Penguin. Chesterton, G. K. (2011) Orthodoxy, Thirsk: House of Stratus. Clark, Stephen R. L. (1985) Slaves and Citizens, Philosophy 60: 27–46. Clark, Stephen R. L. (2016) Going beyond our Worlds to Find the World—What Reason Is Really for, in A. Blank (ed.), Animals: New Essays, Munich: Philosophia Verlag, 397–418. Darwin, C. (1981 [1871]) The Descent of Man, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Darwin, F. (ed.) (1887) The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, London: Murray. Horowitz, Alexandra (2009) Inside of a Dog, New York: Simon and Schuster. Hume, D. (1976 [1777]) Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, A. W. Colver and J. V. Price (eds), Oxford: Clarendon. Long, A. A. and D. N. Sedley (eds) (1987), The Hellenistic Philosophers, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lovejoy, A. O. (1930) The Revolt Against Dualism, London: Allen and Unwin. Marchant, J. (2010) Ancient Astronomy: Mechanical Inspiration, Nature 468: 496–498. Michelson, Andreas et al. (2012) Effects of Phlebotomy-induced Reduction of Body Iron Stores on Metabolic Syndrome: Results from a Randomized Clinical Trial. BMC Medicine 10: 54. Nahin, P. J. (2006) Dr.Euler’s Fabulous Formula: Cures Many Mathematical Ills, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Newman, J. H. (1903) Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, London: Longmans Green & Co. Philo of Alexandria (1929–62) Collected Works, F. H. Colson, G. H. Whitaker et al. (trans.), London: Heinemann. Plotinus (1966–88) The Enneads, A. H. Armstrong (trans.), London: Heinemann. Tegmark, M. (2014) Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality, London: Allen Lane. Wells, H. G. (1970 [1895]) The Time Machine, London: Heinemann. Wigner, E. P. (1960) The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences, Communications on Pure and Applied Mathematics, 13: 1–14. doi:10.1002/cpa.3160130102. Wilmot, J. (2013) Selected Poems, P. Davis (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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PART II

The thinking of thinking from Augustine to Gödel

4 THE MYTH OF THE MENTAL An Augustinian critique of Dreyfus and McDowell Catherine Pickstock

1 Introduction In this essay, I invoke pre-modern ontological and teleological considerations to address recent debates concerning mind, world and truth. I will suggest ways in which Augustine’s and Aquinas’s metaphysical frameworks and cosmic politics anticipate a critique of Hubert Dreyfus’ hazarding of a reductive naturalism, and John McDowell’s hazarding of a continued, and not perfectly naturalistic transcendental dualism, and propose a theory of truth which takes account of embodiment, situatedness and temporality, but without giving way to a hollowed-out emptying of meaning. ∗ Can dogs make syllogisms? Not long before René Descartes downgraded their status (1985–91: 1, 140–41; 3, 302, 365–66), the dignity of dogs was debated before James I at the University of Cambridge. It was concluded that they can, in the barest form of the enthymeme or act of probable reasoning. As Samuel Clarke summarised the conclusion of John Preston, sometime Master of Emmanuel College, himself summarising the views of the ancient Stoic philosopher, Chrysippus He instanced in a Hound who had the major proposition in his mind, namely: The Hare is gone either this way or that way: smells out the minor with his nose; namely She is not gone that way, and follows the Conclusion: Ergo this way with open mouth. (1677: 81–82) As the citation of Chrysippus indicates, Preston was here invoking a very old manner of thinking. One might refer to this as ‘the naturalism of the ancients’, in an echo of Benjamin Constant’s distinction between the liberty of the ancients and the liberty of the moderns (1988: 307–28). For in doing so, I am not referring to the usual modern connotations of the term ‘naturalism’, but rather, am seeking to point out a non-naturalism which both modern materialists and modern idealists and realists share in common as to the presumed meaning of the term. This shared meaning is a denial of any ascription of ‘form’, apprehension, sensation or intelligence to the natural, material order, or to any mode of hylomorphism. Thus, materialists such as Herbert Spencer, J. S. Mill or W. V. O. Quine would have sought to reduce 49

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thought-processes to mechanical, material ones, whereas Descartes, Kant and their successors saw apprehension as transcending the material domain altogether. In both cases, one finds a subscription to a certain rupture between human nature, on the one hand, and raw nature, in some sense, on the other. Hence, if today one were to suggest that human intelligence were just an elevated instance of animal intelligence or sensation, one might suspect this to be part of a reductive agenda of some kind. By contrast, if one were pursuing a non-reductive agenda, one might be likely to insist upon the elevated difference of human understanding, human valuation and human access to logic. Yet in the case of what I am calling ‘the naturalism of the ancients’, as invoked in its twilight by Preston, there is nothing reductive about the account of the clever canine. On the contrary, the point is to evoke the divine wisdom, whether immanent or transcendentally derived, which runs through nature and to instance the hierarchical continuity of the presence of this wisdom in the case of the dog’s dazzling discernment. Whereas one might suggest, in a secularised cosmos, that the relative elevation of the lower is threatening to the status of the higher, namely humanity, in a divinised or else a divinely created cosmos, this elevation is not so threatening, since human dignity does not here depend upon an unbridgeable gap and is not an exclusively human possession. Rather, it depends upon human participation in the divine and perhaps in a transcendent divinity. But this participation is enjoyed by human beings to an exalted degree, because nature shares somewhat in it. It is by firmly rooting human beings in a natural order that one can come to understand how they might be so especially engraced (Milbank 2015a: 78–90).

2 The myth of the mental These introductory remarks are of relevance to thinking about the stance one might take towards contemporary philosophical debates about truth, mind and world. It is hard at this point to overlook recent philosophico-theological inferences, which have been drawn by religiously agnostic philosophers to various effect, that consciousness is a mystery of the mental, that logic cannot be psychologically reduced, and that the mind, as Kant argued, operates according to the application of categories which have an inexplicably more than natural origin. One can think, for example, of Karl Rahner, Bernard Lonergan, Donald Mackinnon and Nicholas Lash, as variously taking such a path. Leaning upon this rather precarious support in the void, it is hoped that one will be able to throw out some sort of rope in search of heavenly anchorage. But is this the right strategy? Should theologians embrace the non-naturalism of the modern approach, or should they rather seek to reconsider and revivify the naturalism of a pre-modern outlook? This need not be a reactionary strategy, because, several of the most radical thinkers, from Xavier Bichat and Maine de Biran, in the Romantic era, through Félix Ravaisson, in the nineteenth century, to his pupil Henri Bergson and then Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in the twentieth, have sought such a retrieval. These thinkers chose this strategy in the course of a hyper-critical consideration and revision of the supposedly ‘critical’ Cartesian and Kantian positions, which led to the rupture between the natural and the human-cultural to which I have referred. To see why there might be a problem with these positions, let us consider the recent debate between John McDowell and Herbert Dreyfus (Schear 2013). Both thinkers seek to reject the so-called ‘myth of the given’, the artificial idea, identified by Wilfrid Sellars (1997), that human thought confronts an unproblematic mass of unthought material or phenomena which is somehow just ‘there’. Against this, McDowell insists that human conceptuality filters all the way down, and is always already involved in one’s 50

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perceptions and actions, to the degree that these may be comprehended as recognitions and aims, even if the recognising and the aiming are unconscious. While still fundamentally thinking of this conceptuality as ‘transcendental’, McDowell modifies Kant, first, by regarding one’s ability to think as less category-bound, and, secondly, by denying that one’s ability to think lies outside the natural order. Rather, he deploys an Aristotelian notion of ‘second nature’ to describe it. How does the second nature relate to first nature? As already mentioned, McDowell toys with the idea that if one only has access to the world via meaning, and one wishes to remain realist in one’s perspective, then meaning must lie outside in the world, as well as inside one; and yet he also seems to draw back from this radical implication (1994: 108–26). In criticism of McDowell, Dreyfus (in Schear 2013: 15–40) alleges that he (McDowell) ascribes to a ‘myth of the mental’, through which he exaggerates the importance of conceptual thinking, even of an unconscious kind. Most of one’s comportments in and towards the world are rather achieved through habits and spontaneities of the body, upon which one does not reflect at all. In this way, one learns and continues to eat, to walk, to reach out and to occupy space in relation to other people. In this way, also, one must learn to speak at the outset. McDowell’s retort to Dreyfus (in Schear 2013: 41–58) is that, by conceptuality, he had not referred to a detached, representational gaze, but rather, intended to affirm that much of one’s intelligence is incarnated. He suggests that Dreyfus himself has, by negative implication, too restricted and Cartesian an understanding of human reason, which seems to supervene upon, and be separated from natural bodily responses. Nevertheless, McDowell allows that some cultural processes, such as the automatic sense of standing at an appropriate distance from other human beings in a crowded train carriage, are pre-conceptual in character. But since he does not take account of Dreyfus’ phenomenological point that, in such an instance, the body itself seems to perform a kind of non-cognitive reflection, he might appear to be in danger of reducing this sort of behaviour to the mere operation of efficient causality. This is perhaps the reverse face of McDowell’s continuing Kantianism, according to which he conceives understanding in terms of aim and proposition, and not in terms of relation and event—in terms of a constant negotiating or working out how to be with other things and people in a shared world. On the other hand, Dreyfus, by banishing intelligence from the body, would seem to be in danger of reducing such behaviour to a kind of vitalist spontaneity. This is the reverse face of his apparent elevation and separation of the mental, as already mentioned. So neither thinker seems quite to be able to see the body as the site of a fusion of material action with conceptual thought, since this would suggest that sensing and thinking are not alien to material nature, and that there is a continuity of eidos and meaningful motion, or ‘spirit’, from one to another, as for ‘ancient’ realism, to which ‘post-epistemological’ considerations of bodily immersion, as favoured by Dreyfus, were not unknown. The Dreyfus-McDowell debate is an example of the way in which both analytic and phenomenological philosophies tend not to overcome the myth of the given, even when it is claimed, as it variously is by both McDowell and Dreyfus, to be extending this overcoming to the maximal degree. For in both cases, one remains ultimately within an epistemological paradigm for which there is a given appearing world, on the one hand, and a given conceptual apparatus, on the other. Even if these two are from the beginning only known through one another, as Kant critically said, and even if, as both thinkers affirm, it is harder to isolate the respective contributions of outer and inner than Kant supposed, it remains the case that there are still two givens, and that there is a rupture between them.1 Seeking to heal this rupture, and to explain the continuity which will remove the sense of isolated poles, is the stake of the Dreyfus-McDowell debate. Yet the conclusions they reach 51

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demonstrate that it is impossible to overcome the rupture if one remains within epistemological terms, since these terms can themselves be seen as the seat of the problem. It has been suggested that the insurmountable difficulty, adjacent to the problem of ‘the given’, is the problem of ‘correlation’, after Quentin Meillassoux (2009). In order to avoid a duality of givens, epistemology must constantly be tempted either by materialist empiricism, which reduces given thought to given sensation and which cannot in consequence account for mental phenomena, or by idealism, which reduces sensation to thought, denying one’s manifest experience in such a way that requires an ‘exalted reductionism’ which is faced with the problem of ‘explanation by causing to vanish’, as much as it does the more debased version. If, by contrast, epistemology were to follow common sense by seeking to hold fast to fully fledged realism, in some mode, however etiolated, then it pays the price of entertaining an alien ontological guest. This price is its inability to explain why awareness and reality should correlatively match one another, as if within a pre-established harmony. Wittgenstein implicitly raises and provides no answer to this question with respect to language, and likewise Heidegger with respect to moods and practice which are supposed to disclose the ontological. But, as Meillassoux asks, can one remain content with such a mysterious agnosticism, as this would bring philosophy into conflict with the point of view of physical and evolutionary science, which holds that one’s human bodies and minds also belong to nature and that they too have gradually evolved. Thomas Nagel (2012) has argued that if a reductive explanation of consciousness, animal feeling and recognition of value seems implausible and unrealisable, then a realist comprehension of scientific understanding—whereby one really does ‘think’ the real—is bound to reconsider whether nature herself has a teleological direction. He contends that this seems more plausible than the most extreme forms of pan-psychism which would reduce reality not to material atoms, but to psycho-material equivalents. These equivalents need not, one can note, according to a panpsychist advocate such as Galen Strawson (2018: 154–76), in any sense be vital or ‘living’, since, following Sir Arthur Eddington (2012), he suggests that, since science claims sensorily undetectable items, such as atoms, quanta and quarks, to be fundamental, one has no warrant for thinking there is any vital substructure more basic than this ‘intellectual’ one. Accordingly, Strawson sustains a Cartesian duality of mind and matter, omitting their mediation by life, and taking this in the somewhat Spinozist direction of allowing that this ontological schizophrenia apply to every reality whatsoever. Several problems here arise. First, how is one to explain the phenomenon of life in living things that possess the irreducible marks of spontaneous self-generated growth, movement and reproduction? If this phenomenon is implausibly seen as just ‘emergent’, then, as in the case of the mind, one might entertain vitalism for the same reason that one might entertain panpsychism. Alternatively, one might, with still greater implausibility, deny the reality of life altogether. A second problem is that the ontologisation of one’s conceptual modelling of micro-reality tends to lead to the denial of the primacy of an ‘energetic’ reality which one has the sense of partially exploring, and is found, with quantum physics, to be increasingly ‘resistant’ to this exploration. At the same time, it tends to lead to the unwarranted assumption that the microlevel has ontological primacy over the manifest and dynamic forms of physical things. One suspects that Strawson is inclined to deny an ontological status to life because he hopes thereby safely to contain panpsychism as an empirical and epistemological thesis, faintly suggestive of an ontology, but one that is not in need of metaphysical elaboration. It is ‘just the given case’ that everything is in some sense cognitive. But since this is to think the lower in terms of the higher, counter-reductively, no panpsychism can evade the implication that ‘mind itself’, with its spontaneity and semantic capacity, stands behind or within reality. And if the 52

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higher sort of mind possessed by human beings must ineluctably be the paradigm of the mental, there is no warrant, for the anti-Cartesian reasons earlier rehearsed, for separating the mental from the vital, since one clearly experiences a connection between thought and vital energy from within oneself. For Nagel, the problem with such panpsychism is twofold: first, the problem of explaining the evolution of something both intensively and qualitatively different—specifically human minds—would remain in place. Or, secondly, this qualitative difference would have been denied by thought itself, in parallel with the case of materialists who contradictorily have recourse to logic in arguing that life and consciousness are illusions. By comparison, the advantage of a teleological framework is that it preserves the common-sense recognition of a difference between rocks, plants, animals and human beings, but allows for a scientific grasp of continuity between them—and even, one could argue, for an analogical mode of vitalism and panpsychism, with vitalism as the natural mediating link between the relatively cognitive and the relatively inert. It is an invocation of teleology, along with an invocation of a hierarchical scale of forms, also implied by Nagel, which appears to be missing from the debate between McDowell and Dreyfus. It provides a means by which to break the correlationist circle of double givenness of unmediable matter and mind which seems at variance with the findings of natural science and its assumptions of the real continuity and unity of reality. It also seems to provide a means by which to understand how conscious knowledge and action are more than bodily awareness, and yet are also intensifications of such an awareness. For unless nature is in some way ‘supposed’—or minded—to act intelligently, it becomes baffling as to why so much of one’s intelligence is prepared and shaped by the kind of body which one happens to have, including for example the human body’s handedness, capable of touch, and why one’s intelligence, as exemplified in speech, art, dance and music, has to be incarnated in one’s body, and becomes a matter of habit. As Xavier Bichat (1994), and later Maine de Biran (2006), asked, how can one explain the fact that, while habit normally dulls physical and sensory reactions and perceptions, in the case of animal as well as human bodies, it can also, in other instances, elevate those reactions? Modifying Bichat, Biran concluded that this has to do with the operation of something physically active and constant which is apparent in conscious, judging deliberation, and which emerges at the point where passive sensation weakens through over-usage. The more one merely tastes wine, the less intensely one savours it; but the more, almost inevitably, in an effort to counteract this, one deliberately seeks out different vintages and compares them, the more acutely one’s palette is educated in discrimination. In the first case, habituation dulls the senses; in the second, habitual practice intensifies and refines the repertoire of one’s tasting awareness. But how is it that matter is receptive to such deliberation, and so much so that it can reinforce it, and modify or develop it further, in the way that the wine-taster’s tongue comes to know at once, or an artist’s brush comes to think for her, or a dancer’s steps refine the choreographer’s intentions? By contrast, without introducing these ontological and teleological considerations into the debate concerning mind, world and truth, Dreyfus’ perspective hazards a reductive naturalism, and McDowell’s hazards a continued, and not perfectly naturalistic transcendental dualism.

3 A different ‘given’ These considerations necessarily re-invoke the ‘naturalism of the ancients’. Let us briefly explicate this naturalism in terms of consciousness, logic, reason and valuation. As Daniel Heller-Roazen (2007) has argued, ancient and medieval philosophy referred less to self-aware thinking or conscientia, which has become one’s ‘consciousness’, than to synaesthesia 53

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or reflective sensation. Such an emphasis tends to elevate animals, without downgrading human beings. It suggests that animals know that they sense; they sense their sensing, and this is why it is thought that the dog can make his wise decision at the crossroads, whether one allows this to be an act of syllogistic reasoning or not. In sensing their sensing, they mingle and combine their senses to give rise to a ‘common sensing’. When in search of an understanding of human selfawareness, Augustine speaks in De Libero Arbitrio of an inner sense, shared with animals, which pertains to their sensation of things and their self-preservation, an idea which he derives from the Stoics (1993: I, 7–10; II, 2–7, 12–16, 33–44). All that human reason adds to this, for Augustine, is two things: first, it adds a further reflection whereby one can isolate and name both common sensing and the individual senses, and, secondly, the awareness of one’s own participation in the divine light of judgment. In fact, human beings determine that they are rational because their higher reflexivity places them higher up the hierarchy, and so in a position to rule animals. But, for Augustine, human beings know that this is not merely a domination of animals, because they rule with their own higher-animal wisdom as instruments of the divine government. It should be clear from this account just how much we still seem to misread Augustine in post-Cartesian terms, by eliding the dominant notes of ontological continuity and the inseparability of reasoning from an exercise of cosmic politics. Truth is not for him removed from being, nor from the pursuit of the good (see Williams 2016). Equally, in the case of Aristotle’s De Anima (429a2–b22; 431a9–b22), human reason is described as a further reflexivity of animal sensation, and truth as a kind of intensification of the good. It is functional for animals to see what is good or bad for them, and yet, as Nagel agrees (2012: 97–126), one cannot reduce the phenomenality of sensation to function, and therefore it is the case that one cannot reduce the goods and evils apprehended by sensation to function either. Maybe the apprehensions exist mainly for the functions; and yet it is equally logical to argue that the functions exist for the purer sake of apprehensions. Thus, Aristotle claims in De Anima (431b10–12) that ‘the true’ is simply the human awareness of a more universal goodness in nature in general. Here a kind of naturalistic pragmatism flows seamlessly into a metaphysical affirmation of the unity of the true with the good and the existent. In the case of logic and reason, modern philosophy since Gottlob Frege and Edmund Husserl has tended to refuse the psychologism of J. S. Mill, which would reduce the laws of thinking to the laws of nature (see Kusch 1995). Yet thinkers within the Platonic, Aristotelian and Stoic traditions, as has already been intimated, were psychologistic in a different but still naturalistic sense. For since they regarded God or spirit as an ultimate principle and reality, they could not have separated truth from either thinking or life which makes truth possible: by comparison, the supposedly non-reductive and anti-psychologistic account of truth in modern times embalms a ‘dead’ truth, a truth which would pertain whether life or spirit were present or not. Will not a theological perspective be likely to find this as atheistic as Mill’s alternative, while it can still seek to do justice in more traditional terms to Mill’s unease about a duality between being and reason, an unexplained rupture between a material world that is just ‘there’, on the one hand, and the mysterious process of ‘making sense’, on the other? Moreover, if reason is thought of as, following Augustine, ‘a higher kind of life’ (1993: 1, 7), then one can locate it primarily in human style and ritual, rather than in a fixed categorial apparatus or a separate transcendental power. This strange bringing-together of action and meaning constitutes human culture, yet depends upon one’s animal rather than one’s merely organic dual capacity for self-movement and the embracing of space, both of which are allowed by the bi-symmetry of the animal structure: two legs, hands, eyes, the cerebral hemispheres of the brain etc., as first noted by Bichat. 54

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What is irreducible in one’s thinking, as Hubert Dreyfus and Charles Taylor (2015) later concluded, is paradoxically that element that is linked to embodiment, sensation and feeling. It is ironically the case that the truths which are held to be objectively indifferent to subjectivity and consciousness can readily be fed as algorithms into lifeless computers, since the answers which are true regardless of awareness are the answers which can appear on a print-out with no one present to read them. Anti-psychologism therefore faces the problem of a hidden collusion between the intendedly elevating—the view that logic is true independent of one’s reasoning—and the effectively reductive—the view that it is precisely pure objectivity which can be mechanised. The surplus to the formula, which no computer can register, is not logic as such, but rather, as earlier suggested, the feeling of ‘rightness’ which attends logic, which is but a sub-species of elevated human feeling in general. Once more, pace Strawson, it is the living mind that characterises the cognitively psychic: the mere presence of coded triggers in nature would not be sufficient to suggest the beginnings of the mental, were it not the case that these codes had to be constantly ‘felt’ and circumstantially ‘read’ and developed in unpredictable ways (see Milbank 2011). It is living, animal feeling, including the feeling of the unity of mind, that can be so elevated as not to be reducible, rather than a seemingly detached, logical coding, whose ability to be exhaustively coded proves its kinship with dead mechanism, which is a kind of extinct life, reducible to the stasis of a corpse whose entropic decay can be formalised. Human reason, on this reading, would seem to be an intensified reflective common-sensing, inseparable from touch, dispersed through the senses, and inseparable also from habit. For in the reflexivity of touch and the benefits of refined habits, one is instancing living realities which arise respectively from the reflexivity of sensation, and the reflexive experience of resistance to one’s body by the world which calls forth the phenomenon of ‘effort’, as first thematised by Maine de Biran. As Merleau-Ponty argues, in L’Oeil et l’Esprit (1964), it is not that the world is simply ‘out there’ or ‘over there’, and one’s reasoning consists in detached observation of it. Rather, one can observe the world because one moves about in it, touching and shaping the patterns, which, as the Alva Noë says, the world ‘affords’ to us (in Schear 2013: 178–93). This ‘moving about’ the world in order to see it is primordial and not secondary. A fork-shaped branch in a tree is not first apportioned there as a geometric spectacle into whose sphere or domain one then enters; rather, Noë suggests, it is first there to be sat upon on a bright spring day; it is there because we are there, and vice versa. Similarly, for Merleau-Ponty, were one not in some sense ‘seen’ by what one sees, one would not be able to see at all. In other words, one does not see the pyramid on the sands in the distance because one is located outside both the sands and the pyramid, as if gazing at the whole carapace in a picture on a wall or through a separating lens, but rather, one can see the pyramid because one is included with it in its desert domain, and it is positioning the viewer, and so contributing to one’s sense of location. Without any such sense, one would have no experience of self-identity, and would not be capable of understanding oneself as ‘seeing’. It would appear to follow that there is indeed a given, but that it is ontological rather than epistemological in character. This given is the elusively ‘entire’ world, which includes oneself and one’s various resistances, habits and actions, and in consequence, one’s sensations. Primordial truth is not, for such a framework, a correspondence of mind to thing, but rather the event which occurs between thing and mind. This event, moreover, perforce takes a detour through imagination for it to be accurate. This statement may seem nonsensical. However, if one reconstructs the event of seeing a thing, it seems that imagination plays a part in observation. One can see a thing from one perspective, and so, given this unavoidable limitation, one deploys a loose synecdochic elaboration, imagining the entirety of the thing, and letting this imaginative detour stand for all that one cannot apprehend. So one imagines the thing differently from how one seems to see it—and this occurs, 55

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as it were, in order to see the thing in the first place. A cathedral seen from afar off, seems at first a little blurry and vague, so that one is not absolutely certain that it is the Cathedral, and not some lesser church, or even a water tower. Its real defining lines appear paradoxically invisible or lacking in insistence—abstract almost, or even disappointing. Yet the intensely coloured thrall of one’s necessarily imagined, fuller cathedral is, in fact, pale in its mere virtuality by comparison with the cathedral one actually sees in the distance, whose pale blur nonetheless takes part in a real but distanced solidity. This is why, according to Merleau-Ponty, Upper Paleolithic man, as at Lascaux, felt compelled to overcome both of these inadequacies in the new event of painting. A fine picture, then, would constitute the best instance of ‘a truth’ which one could possibly come up with, in excess of either the externally seen, or the internally imagined reality. It will reveal the invisible serpentine line, as Merleau-Ponty puts it (1964: 72–77), after Henri Bergson and Félix Ravaisson, of a portion of reality itself, which necessarily means its serpentine continuity and kinship with all other realities. For the defining overall shape of a thing, which compels us, as in the case, for example, of a statue by Barbara Hepworth or Henry More, is elusively suggested by all the forms and angles which do appear and yet do not in themselves coincide with the whole. Therefore, in seeking to draw out from the statue its missing coherence, one is at once trying to say what allows it to stand out from other realities, and yet also promoting an extension of the statue into further statues which might continue to fill the surrounding landscape. Perception is therefore inseparable from a reception of form as a particularity that also holds, of itself, a ‘universal’ potential for variation. The reality of any entity is an event which it realises by concealing itself, and this very concealment is its impenetrable solidity, its holding in place as a ‘thing’ in the world. In such a way, what is solid is paradoxically empty, and of itself—in order to be and to remain itself—curiously depends upon an extension, a non-identical repetition (see Pickstock 2013). We should perhaps, in this case, as Rowan Williams implies, understand thought as a continuation of this baffling feature of the real, whereby one’s thought seeks to supply what is missing in the thing in order to be true to it, rather than regarding thought as a process of ‘copying’. Such a perspective suggests that there is a continuity of structure and meaning between the world outside one and one’s mental grasp that permits an ontological realism, rather than the merely programmatic encounter with resistance to which Dreyfus’s notion of bodily insertion and negotiation of the physical world might reduce. He tends to ignore the wilder metaphysical shores of Merleau-Ponty’s arguments. ∗ We have sought to describe the ancient and medieval naturalism of consciousness, logic and reason in the dominant Platonic, peripatetic and Stoic currents of thought. But what of the mental recording and shaping of value which must be involved, if one perceives by creatively ‘taking things further’? If, as for Aristotle, the true is the intensification of the good, can there be an account of truth that is not an account of value also? Value is perhaps the wrong term to use, because, as the contemporary Catholic philosopher Rémi Brague has argued (2011: 47–49, 55–63), one talks of value because one has abolished the Good. This abolition became inevitable when Ibn Sina conceived existence as conceptually distinct from quiddity, as though it could be a fully fledged concept on its own, whereas any existence is always the defined existence ‘of something’ (Milbank 2015b: 41–51). In doing this, he deployed terminology which seemed to reduce being to the mere instance of existence which ‘arrives’ to an essence that is indifferent to actuality or possibility: the existence of the lesser celandine has nothing to do with its yellowness (Brague 2011: 45–46). As mere existence, 56

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being seems no longer good in itself, and inversely the good is no longer that which always actually exists, both in lower and higher degrees. So the good has no place to go, save as something one posits as ‘value’. Just like reason, the good has been exiled from nature, life and the soul. From now on, it must be something one makes up, or else, if it is objective, something mysteriously dead and arraigned on sliding scales. This is perhaps why modern morality, from Kant to the strictures of political correctness, is so severe and un-serpentine in character, offering a seemingly modest formalism of procedure such as ‘act only under universalizable maxims’, ‘treat others always as ends’—which must devolve into something more rigidly inflexible than substantive appeal to the exemplarity of specific conduct in a specific social role. Since all maxims are perforce mixed with contingent aims, and helping people always with deploying and co-enlisting them in one fashion or other, the unexceptionable content of the universal and the teleological is surreptitiously supplemented by a thinned-out but still substantial procedure. In this way, for example, ‘human rights’ can become oppressively indifferent to the variations of context and competing human requirements. Rather, for antique-medieval naturalism and its new variant in the tradition of French ‘spiritual realism’ and vitalism, from Maine de Biran to Merleau-Ponty, the good was an appointed but undulating pathway to a transcendent horizon (Janicaud 1997). But it was also, within this world, refracted in a multiple fashion through many mirrors. These are not the mirrors of exact representation, but rather the mirrors of identity whereby the object in an infinity of mirrors is still the same object, ever-further known through ever-receding refractions, since nothing can be exhaustively present for a single perspective, unless that be of the thing itself upon itself, like the interiority of a statue, of which one would be able to say nothing whatsoever. This is the more radical implication drawn from the idea of knowledge as repetition, rather than representation, by thinkers such as Merleau-Ponty. But in his final works, he arguably implies a certain teleology and Aristotelian theory of knowledge as the transfer of things to the human mind of identical species, and perhaps, implicitly, the convertibility of the transcendentals (Merleau-Ponty 1964: 40, 46). In terms of this universal exchange, the most that one can say of truth is that it is good, and that it is being, and conversely, each in all three instances. This is not to identify the three terms in the normal way, but rather to suggest that reality mysteriously offers itself in three overlapping and coinciding aspects. Yet this is very simple: one simultaneously sees the spring wood to be, to be good for anyone, in their right senses, to be in, and to be a true manifestation of woodness and so of being, of which woodness is an instance. And one sees it outside oneself, and within oneself, and the wood as an occurrence or arrival. One does not tend, by contrast, to encounter a neutral uninflected being, or a good that is not, or a truth that is not. Nor does one encounter a truth that is appalling, for if a truth is appalling, then, as for Augustine, its light is to one’s condemnation. But that is impossible without the light, and this means that the condemnation is to one’s ultimate benefit, since one receives the truth with shock and horror because it holds out the possibility of emendation of life, whether at an individual or collective level (Confessions X, 23, 34). It is difficult to see how this circumstance can pertain unless the convertibility of the transcendentals is grounded in their final invisible and simple unity, for which one has no name. It is also hard to see how it can pertain unless this unity in some way brings about, or intends, a higher intensity of being, goodness and truth, first as life, and then as conscious life, which is spirit. And in such a case, one is at once justified in reading reality ‘metaphysically’ in terms of one’s own interiority to that reality, as for Augustine and, much later, Goethe (see Hadot 2008), and yet as reading oneself, as Aquinas indicated, in terms of one’s continuity with all that one can glean of reality from external appearances. 57

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It is arguable that the perspective of immanence, as for the earlier Bergson or for MerleauPonty, will in the end seek to locate the absolute within a timeless interior space of ecstatic eventful duration, a contradictory mental stillness of movement as such. By comparison, the invocation of transcendence prevents this stilling of the dance in the mind. Just because there is no ultimate source or end within this world, its relativities, movements and mirrorings ceaselessly rotate and aspire, even if they can catch something of that ultimate which escapes them, like an elusive baton which is still somehow passed from person to person, thing to thing. What is here aspired to is the contemplation of truth; truth which coincides with infinite simple existence, and is therefore, as for Aquinas (2010:1–6), self-authenticating in its height, fullness and cosmo-political authority. Outside the foretasting of this truth, there could not be any degree of truth, since one’s merely perspectival gazes could be trumped by a final abyss of relativity. But in order to be participated in, truth must constantly arrive as the goodness of new being, and supremely as human birth, as Hannah Arendt after Augustine, realised (Arendt 1998). One’s cultural rituals celebrate this arrival, while, as Aquinas says, in his Commentary on John (2010,8, 4), the Christian liturgy gives access to truth because it renders accessible the truth of the birth of God himself as man, required to undo the human occlusion of truth, which renders blindness powerless to regain it. This truth for Aquinas is not just the truth of God but the truth of God as giving access to this truth, of sharing this truth and so revealing it to be love. So, to the figures of reason and truth as journey, mirror and dance, Aquinas adds that of the ladder on which the angels constantly ascend and descend above the sleeping head of Jacob (2010:332, 130–31). Reason may indeed sleep, since it belongs to natural life, which will reawaken. But if truth is both an horizontal dance in time, and a vertical dance in the skies, and these dances are interrupted and re-instigated by truth as arrival, then it follows that there is a limit to the possibility of one’s speaking of the truth. Rather, the implication of these figures is that, even as theory, truth urges itself upon one, seeking to be expressed or performed. This conclusion is in keeping with the idea that truth coincides with the transcendentals of being and of goodness. As being, truth ultimately is, beyond any notion of correspondence. As goodness, the desirability of being, always essentially instanced, truth must be given, must be enacted, liturgically received and poetically performed, at once through the body, the senses and the mind. So just as, for Plato, the good must strangely be seen in order to be done, so, inversely, for the case of truth, it must strangely be brought about; it must eventuate and be enacted if it is to become manifest. It is in the instance of religious bodies, including the Church, that one encounters institutions claiming simultaneously to be pursuing the good, such as a political entity, and to be pursuing the truth, such as an academic entity like a university. The heart of religion is ritual, which, as we have seen, is arguably the point of transition from animal to human life, and the heart of the Church is liturgy, which is at once a repetition of the ultimate political rule of the Church in terms of creed, order of office and authoritative divine descent, and a waiting upon the renewed descent of truth as mystery in excess of our capacity to discern this. So, an apophatic account of truth which allows this mystery, must, as Dionysius the Areopagite and Maximus the Confessor suggested, conclude its theoretical deliberations by returning them to the context of the liturgical gesture which is the place of community. I have tried in the foregoing to suggest how the mental experience of truth is rooted in the sensory experience of truth, which it fulfils without denying, and to which it must constantly return. If the embodied manifestation of truth is perforce liturgical, then the mental aspect of this manifestation must be prayer: an attention to God which seeks to be attuned to, and to mediate his power in ways both discernible and indiscernible. Prayer is not here an occasional and emergency aberration or interruption of thought, but its constancy, insofar as it is thought at all; that is to say, insofar as it is the springing up from below, and a supervening from above of the happening of the truthful (see Lacoste 2014). 58

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Note 1

This accords with the observation that Dreyfus and Charles Taylor, in their later perpetuation of this debate, arguably see Kant as qualifying, rather than intensifying, a duality supposedly traceable to Descartes, and read ‘meta-critique’ as a deepening of ‘critique’, rather than its post-critical reversal. In consequence, they would seem to situate their endeavours in a Kantian lineage, despite many qualifications. See Milbank (1998: 21–37).

References Aquinas, T. (2010) Commentary on the Gospel of John, Chapters 1–5, F. Larcher and J. A. Weisheipl (trans.), Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press. Arendt, H. (1998) Love and Saint Augustine, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Augustine (1993) On Free Choice of the Will, T. Williams (trans.), Indianapolis: Hackett. Bichat, X. (1994) Recherches Physiologiques sur la Vie et la Mort (Première Partie), Paris: Flammarion. Biran, M. de (2006) Influence de l’habitude sur la faculté de penser, Paris: L’Harmattan. Brague, R. (2011) Les Ancres dans Le Ciel: L’Infrastructure Métaphysique, Paris: Seuil. Clarke, S. (1677) The Lives of Thirty-Two English Divines, in A General Martyrologie, 3rd ed., London: Printed for William Birch. Constant, B. (1988) Political Writings, B. Fontana (trans.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Descartes, R. (1985–91) The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, 3 vols., J. Cottingham et al. (ed. and trans.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dreyfus H. and C. Taylor (2015) Retreiving Realism, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Eddington, A. (2012) The Nature of the Physical World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hadot, P. (2008) The Veil of Isis: A History of the Idea of Nature, M. Chase (trans.), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hiller-Roazen, D. (2007) The Inner Touch, New York: Zone. Janicaud, D. (1997) Ravaisson et la Métaphysique: Une Généalogie du Spiritualisme Franҫais, Paris: Vrin. Kusch, M. (1995) Psychologism: A Case Study in the Sociology of Philosophical Knowledge, New York: Psychology Press. Lacoste, J.-Y. (2014) From Theology to Theological Thinking, W. C. Hackett (trans.), Charlottesville: Virginia University Press. McDowell, J. (1994) Mind and World, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Meillassoux, Q. (2009) After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, R. Brassier (trans.), London: Continuum. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964) L’Oeil et l’Esprit, Paris: Éditions Gallimard. Milbank, J. (1998) Hamann and Jacobi: Prophets of Radical Orthodoxy, in J. Milbank, C. Pickstock and G. Ward (eds), Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology, London: Routledge. 21–37. Milbank, J. (2011) ‘Hume Versus Kant: Faith, Reason and Feeling,’ in S. Coakley (ed.), Modern Theology, Vol. 27.2, London: Blackwell, 276–297. Milbank, J. (2015a) The Psychology of Cosmopolitics, in E. A. Lee and S. Kimbriel (eds), The Resounding Soul: Reflections on the Metaphysics and Vivacity of the Human Person, Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock. 78–90. Milbank, J. (2015b) Manifestation and Procedure: Trinitarian Metaphysics after Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas, in M. Salvioli (ed.), Tomismo Creativo: Letture Contemporanee del Doctor Communis, Bologna: Edizioni Studio Domenicano. 41–51. Nagel, T. (2012) Mind and Cosmos: Why the Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pickstock, C. (2013) Repetition and Identity, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schear, J. K. (ed.) (2013) Mind, Reason and Being-in-the-World: the McDowell-Dreyfus Debate, London and New York: Routledge. Sellars, W. (1997), Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Strawson, G. (2018) Things That Bother Me: Death, Freedom, the Self etc, New York: NYRB. Williams, R. (2016) On Augustine, London: Bloomsbury.

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5 ROMANTIC THINKING Nicholas Halmi

1 Introduction In The Life of the Mind Hannah Arendt argued that although Kant, in distinguishing reason (Vernunft) from intellect or understanding (Verstand), had separated thinking from knowing and thereby liberated reason to think beyond the limits of the world given to the senses, he and subsequent German philosophers did not fully appreciate the implications of this separation. Constrained by the philosophical tradition, Kant and his successors, Arendt maintained, demanded of reason the kind of results and evidence appropriate to cognition. Consequently, they paid little ‘attention to thinking as an activity and even less to the experiences of [the] thinking ego’ (Arendt 1978: 15). Applied to the German early Romantic thinkers, however, this argument does not stand up. For early Romantic thought was nothing if not, as Walter Benjamin phrased it, ‘the thinking of thinking’ (2008: 29–30).1 Who were these ‘early Romantic thinkers’? Because Romantic and Romanticism have remained contested terms since their introduction at the beginning of the nineteenth century (see Halmi 2019), serving equally as typological and chronological designations, their use here calls for explanation. I use the terms narrowly, but with the sanction of custom, to refer to a philosophical tendency developed—largely in response to the teachings of Johann Gottlieb Fichte from 1794 to 1799—and represented principally by Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843), Friedrich von Hardenberg (‘Novalis’, 1772–1801), and Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829). For the purposes of the present chapter, the most salient characteristics of this Romantic tendency are (1) its antifoundationalism, in particular its rejection of both Karl Leonhard Reinhold’s Kantian grounding of knowledge in the ‘fact of consciousness’ and Fichte’s grounding of knowledge in the subjective act of self-positing; (2) its desire to overcome the idealist legacy of the dualism of subject and object; (3) its recognition of the limits of discursive reason within the context of philosophical thought; (4) an emphasis on unconsciousness, feeling, and aesthetic experience as integral components of thought, and (5) its insistence that philosophy requires art as its complement. Whether F. W. J. Schelling (1775–1854), who taught philosophy at Jena from 1798 to 1803, should be included under the rubric of Frühromantik, early Romanticism, is a subject of debate (for example, Manfred Frank excludes him while Frederick Beiser admits him). I omit him from consideration both for lack of space and because he differed from the three Romantics discussed 60

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below in adhering to the aims and methods of systematic philosophy. Although, in his System des transcendentalen Idealismus (System of Transcendental Idealism, 1800), Schelling assigned uniquely to art the role of revealing the original identity and the constitutive interaction of consciousness and unconsciousness in human thought (1856–61: 3.619, 3.627–28), he conceived this function as fulfilling an essentially philosophical goal. Hence, his description of art as ‘at once the only true and eternal instrument [Organon] and document of philosophy’, externalizing empirically what would otherwise remain confined to thought (1856–61: 3.627–28), and thereby effectively confirming philosophy’s indemonstrable first principle. Schelling thus instrumentalized art in a way that Hölderlin, Novalis and Schlegel did not, or would have not recognized themselves as doing, even as he insisted that it has no ulterior purpose (1856–61: 3.622). Moreover, while Schelling continued to occupy himself with aesthetics and art for several years after 1800, art lost in the new phase of his intellectual development the exalted position that it had occupied in the System (see Hammermeister 2002: 77–82).

2 Reflective consciousness First, some context for Romantic thinking about thinking. One might say, pace Arendt, that from Descartes to Kant philosophy was preoccupied precisely with the experiences of the thinking ego, insofar as self-consciousness was accepted to be the first principle of philosophy. Understood as reflection, thinking—prior to any engagement with specific objects—is supposed to be grounded in a self-objectification whereby the self knows itself as a unity. This theory of self-consciousness, shared in its basics by otherwise diverse philosophers, assumes a thinking subject that ‘stands in a constant relationship to itself ’ as a result of ‘the subject’s making itself into its own object’ (Henrich 1982: 19). But apart from its circularity, since the subject cannot claim to recognize itself in reflection without having a pre-reflective knowledge of itself (see Henrich 1982: 18–21), reflective self-consciousness entails a radical solipsism. Descartes’s cogito ergo sum, whereby the thinking self deduces its existence from the consciousness of its very act of thinking, answered his need for a principle beyond all epistemological doubt. But the existence thus affirmed, consisting purely in thinking (res cogitans) provided no foundation for a knowledge of anything outside the self (res extensa). Thus, Descartes could guarantee the possibility of a knowledge of the world only by appealing to something transcending both the self and the world, a beneficent God, and this appeal depended on first demonstrating God’s existence. Kant criticized Descartes for confusing with the actual empirical self a possible self abstracted from the former (1900–97: 3.426–27, B423n), but he himself resolved the fundamental epistemological problem only to the extent of accepting its insolubility and asserting an even more uncompromising dualism between self and world than Descartes had. Because, he argued, objects of knowledge must conform to the conditions of knowledge—the forms of sensory representation and conceptual organization inherent to the human mind—we cannot claim to know objects as they are in themselves. So while the Cartesian subject is ‘a thinking substance isolated from the world’ (Kaulbach 1969: 159), the Kantian subject, as the transcendental unity of apperception, is confined to the world that it itself creates in thought. In his exposition of Kant’s critical philosophy, Reinhold (1757–1823) argued that consciousness necessarily involves representations (Vorstellungen), and that in consciousness the thinking subject distinguishes representations both from the subject itself and from the objects represented (2007–: 1.128, 4.50). Fichte (1762–1814), who succeeded Reinhold as professor of philosophy at Jena in 1794, rejected this ‘principle of consciousness’ (Satz des Bewußtseins) as entailing an infinite regress, since the subject’s self-awareness of its representation would itself 61

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be a representation, which would presuppose yet another subject cognizant of that representation. He proposed to resolve the Kantian dualism of subject and object—the problem of unknowable things-in-themselves—firmly on the side of subjectivity, avoiding the regress he identified in Reinhold by postulating two kinds of consciousness: although self-consciousness remains for Fichte the condition on which the possibility of knowledge depends, the subject’s awareness of itself must be different in kind from its consciousness of objects. In other words, self-consciousness cannot be representational. Arguing that the self is not a ‘thing’ but an ‘act’ (Thathandlung), constituting itself by positing itself—that is, by thinking—Fichte interpreted self-consciousness, or ‘intellectual intuition’ (intellectuelle Anschauung), as inherent to thought, identifiable theoretically but not accessible experientially: ‘the philosopher finds this intellectual intuition not directly, as an isolated fact [Factum] of consciousness […], but by distinguishing among what in ordinary consciousness occurs as unified and by reducing the whole to its component parts’ (1962–2012: 1/4.216–17; see also Neuhouser 79–86). Fichte remained within the Cartesian tradition insofar as his account of knowledge, like Kant’s, maintained the primacy of the mind itself. And his first principle of the self-positing subject, a principle elaborated in lectures and multiple published versions of his Wissenschaftslehre, or theory of knowledge, did not satisfy the early Romantics.

3 Hölderlin Writing to his friend and former classmate Hegel in January 1795, having attended Fichte’s lectures the preceding November, Hölderlin accused Fichte of dogmatically reifying the selfpositing subject, thus making it equivalent to Spinoza’s monistic concept of substance: his absolute I [absolutes Ich] (=Spinoza’s substance) contains all reality; it is everything, and outside it is nothing; hence there is no object for this absolute I, for otherwise all reality would not be within it; however, a consciousness without an object is not conceivable, and if I myself am this object, then I am as such necessarily restricted, even if it were only in time, hence not absolute; thus no consciousness is conceivable within the absolute I; as absolute I, I have no consciousness, and insofar as I have no consciousness I am (for myself) nothing, hence the absolute I is (for me) Nothing [Nichts]. (Hölderlin 1943–85: 6/1.155) In fact, Hölderlin here misrepresented Fichte, who explicitly denied Spinoza’s grounding of ‘the unity of consciousness in a substance in which both the matter […] and the form of the unity is necessarily determined’ (Fichte 1964–2012: 1/2.280–81, also 1/2.263–64). Although Fichte did not deny the existence of a world independent of thought, he maintained that there is no reality for us but that accessible to consciousness; and he rejected the Kantian thing-in-itself as a nonsense because to think of something at all it is to make it an object of consciousness (1964–2012: 1/2.368, 1/2.414–16). To that extent, Fichte was a more rigorous Kantian than Kant himself. Nonetheless, Hölderlin’s letter to Hegel expressed what was to be one of the early Romantics’ central contentions with Fichte’s ‘critical idealism’: the impossibility of identifying consciousness with the absolute. Although the Romantics agreed with Fichte that the possibility of self-consciousness requires the primordial identity of subject and object, they argued against him that this identity cannot obtain within self-consciousness itself since all consciousness implies a distinction between subject and object: in consciousness one is always 62

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conscious of something. Thus self-consciousness cannot be self-grounding—i.e., a first principle—but must be grounded in something transcending it. To be absolute, the subject can have no consciousness; to have consciousness, the subject cannot be absolute. But Fichte, Hölderlin objected to Hegel, wanted it both ways. In the early 1790s, Hölderlin recorded in notes on F. H. Jacobi’s Über die Lehre des Spinoza (On Spinoza’s Doctrine, 1785) an observation made by G. E. Lessing, an exemplary figure of the German Enlightenment, to Jacobi: ‘Lessing objects that it is among human prejudices to consider thought [Gedanken] the first and noblest thing and to want to derive everything from it, given that everything, including representations [Vorstellungen] depends on higher principles’ (1943–85: 4/1.208). It was exactly this prejudice—what Wilhelm Dilthey called the ‘absolutism of thought’ (1914: 227)—to which Hölderlin himself would object in Fichte’s critical idealism in 1795, both explicitly in his letter to Hegel and implicitly in a fragmentary essay written on a blank leaf possibly detached from his copy of the Wissenschaftslehre. In the latter, which his editor titled ‘Urtheil und Seyn’ (‘Judgement and Being’), Hölderlin identified intellectual intuition not with self-consciousness but with ‘Being’ (Seyn) as the only condition in which subject and object are ‘united in such a way that no separation can be performed without violating the essence of what is to be separated’ (1943–85: 4/1.216). The identity of subject with object in the subject’s self-positing, to which Fichte gave the formal expression ‘I am I’, is merely a qualified identity, according to Hölderlin, because it presupposes a prior distinction between subject and object: ‘How is self-conscious possible? By opposing myself to myself, separating myself from myself, yet recognizing myself as the same in the opposed [im entgegengesetzten als dasselbe] regardless of this separation’ (1943–85: 4/1.217). There is no absolute subject, therefore, only absolute Being. If Being is necessarily unconditioned and undivided, and consciousness is necessarily conditioned and involves division—as Hölderlin emphasizes in his fragment by breaking the word Urtheil, ‘judgement’, down into its constituent parts, Ur (‘original’) and Theilung (‘division’), and explicating it as ‘that separation through which object and subject first become possible’ (1943–85: 4/1.216)—then on what basis can Being be postulated? By definition, it cannot, as the ground of the possibility of consciousness, be directly known. If Being’s status is merely regulative, a necessary assumption like the thing-in-itself for Kant, philosophy remains trapped within subjectivism. If its status is constitutive, granted reality like the monistic substance for Spinoza, philosophy risks succumbing to metaphysical dogmatism. Hölderlin’s response to this dilemma—which in my view did not avoid dogmatic claims for Being—was twofold. First, he reinterpreted intellectual intuition to be not only the primordial unity of subject and object but, as he explained in February 1796 to his friend Friedrich Niethammer, the capacity somehow to apprehend that unity, thus making ‘the conflict between subject and object, between our self [unserem Selbst] and the world, even indeed between reason and revelation, disappear’ (1943–85: 6/1.203). Second, he transferred the question of Being from the philosophical to the aesthetic arena: envisioning a series of ‘philosophical letters’ on the model of Schiller’s Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen (On the Aesthetic Education of Man, 1795), Hölderlin insisted to Niethammer that this aspect of intellectual intuition required of us an ‘aesthetic sense’ (ästhetischer Sinn), and that his letters would accordingly ‘move from philosophy to poetry and religion’ (1943–85: 6/1.203). Terry Pinkard summarizes well the implied argument behind Hölderlin’s conception of the restorative power of intellectual intuition: Since all consciousness requires a judgmental articulation of this pre-reflexive unity of “being” […] we are, as it were, intuitively aware of this unity of “being” in our 63

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consciousness of the world, and it remains a presence in our conscious lives, holding out the promise of a restored unity of the divisions that occur as necessary conditions of our leading self-conscious lives at all. (2002: 142) But it is significant that Hölderlin chose to pursue this line of thought literarily rather than philosophically—the letters proposed in the letter to Niethammer never materialized—representing the human relation to Being figuratively in his poetry and his epistolary novel Hyperion. Dieter Henrich has argued that ‘philosophy was crucial for [Hölderlin], but did not hold out the promise of fulfilling his own nature, which was bound up with the vocation of a poet’ (1997: 69). This is doubtless true, but I would add that poetry offered him what philosophy could not, the prospect of articulating a conscious, albeit indirect, access to Being. Whereas, the intermediate metrical version of Hyperion, composed in Jena in November 1794 to January 1795, centres on the Fichtean themes of self-consciousness and the opposition of the self to the non-self of nature, the penultimate and final prose versions, composed between August 1795 and January 1797, represent the eponymous narrator’s ‘eccentric’ life as a succession of losses—of friends and his beloved Diotima, of his hopes for the liberation of Greece from Ottoman rule. Standing on Acrocorinth, overlooking the isthmus that connects the Peloponnese to mainland Greece—an isthmus symbolizing the divisions, ‘with the tantalizing possibility of reintegration, that characterize human experience’ (Davis 2018: 16)—Hyperion sees in the landscape an intimation of that oneness which eludes him in life: My whole being [Wesen] falls silent and listens when the gentle ripple of the breeze plays about my breast. Lost in the wide blueness, I often look up into the aether and out into the blessed sea, and it’s as if a kindred spirit opened its arms to me, as if the pain of solitude were dissolved into the life of the godhead [Gottheit]. To be one with all, that is the life of the godhead, that is the heaven of man. (Hölderlin 1943–85: 3.8–9) In the Preface to the penultimate version, omitted from the published version, Hölderlin stated explicitly this conception of life as a necessary fall into strife—self-consciousness and the division between subject and object—and an endless striving to ‘restore the peace of all peace that surpasses all reason, to unite ourselves with nature in a single infinite whole’ (1943–85: 3.236). While conceding that ‘neither our knowledge nor our action’ can ever attain to that point ‘where all strife ceases’—‘Being in the exclusive sense of the word’ (a phrase used three times in the preface)—Hölderlin nonetheless insisted that we would have no premonition of it, and hence no self-consciousness and no goal to our striving, if it were not already present (1943–85: 3.237). How is this so? Possibly encouraged by Kant’s argument in the third Critique that beauty can symbolize morality through ‘aesthetic ideas’, in which the ideas of practical reason are presented sensuously ‘with the appearance of an objective reality’ (1900–97: 5.314, sec. 49), Hölderlin concluded his preface with the lapidary formulation that Being ‘is present—as beauty’. Several implications of this conclusion should be noted. First, although the concept of intellectual intuition is accessible to discursive reason, the experience of it is not. Second, because that experience is necessarily unconscious and non-temporal, it can accommodate itself to consciousness only aesthetically, by negating itself through metaphorical substitution—spatially as symbol, temporally as absence. (In Hölderlin’s novel one of these symbols is an idealized ancient Greece whose ruins, the testament to a lost wholeness, mark the landscape that 64

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Hyperion contemplates from the height of Acrocorinth [Davis 2018: 33].) Third, an innate human capacity to appreciate beauty is the very confirmation of that unified Being which discloses its presence through beauty. The circularity of this thought is evident, although Hölderlin sought to elide it by suggesting ‘that aesthetic sense is immune from doubt because the skeptic himself presupposes it’ (Beiser 2002: 386): ‘Believe me’, Hyperion writes, ‘the sceptic finds contradictions and flaws in all that is thought only because he knows the harmony of the flawless beauty that is never thought’ (1943–85: 3.81). What is at issue here, however, is not the validity of Hölderlin’s position but its challenge to a philosophical tradition predicated on the primacy of reflective self-consciousness. Philosophy must negate itself in a sense, by incorporating the aesthetic and accommodating the unconscious, if it is to come to terms with Being. Asked what philosophy has to do with poetry, Hyperion answers, ‘Poetry [Dichtung] […] is the beginning and end of this science. Like Minerva from Jupiter’s head, it springs from the poetry of an infinite divine Being’ (1943–85: 3.81).

4 Novalis In the autumn of 1795 another friend of Niethammer, Friedrich von Hardenberg, began to formulate his own critique of Fichte’s critical idealism in a series of notes to which his twentieth-century editors gave the title Fichte-Studien. Hardenberg, who was to adopt the pseudonym Novalis, had studied under Reinhold in Jena in 1790–91 and had been introduced to Fichte and Hölderlin while visiting Niethammer, who taught philosophy at Jena, in May 1795. But nothing of that meeting—the only one between the two poets—is known except from Niethammer’s laconic diary entry: ‘much spoken about religion and revelation and that for philosophy many questions remain open’ (Novalis 1975–88: 4.588). Because his philosophical reflections took the form primarily of aphorisms and fragments, Novalis’s texts ‘belong to the most difficult of German philosophy’ (Frank 1989: 248); and constructions of a systematic programme out of them are as misguided as dismissals of them as the disconnected ruminations of an essentially mystical poet. His various manuscript collections of notes, posthumously reassembled and edited, represent not failed attempts at systematicity but appropriate expressions of his rejection of the possibility of systematicity, in the sense of a complete and self-consistent discursive exposition of reality. If in the Fichte-Studien his concerns were fundamentally epistemological, in that he did not attribute to the absolute the ontological status that Hölderlin did—or at least did not do so unambiguously—Novalis’s critique of the Wissenschaftslehre nonetheless developed along lines similar to Hölderlin’s, both in asserting the cognitive limits of reflective consciousness and in assigning poetry (broadly conceived) a crucial function in relation to philosophy. Novalis shared with Hölderlin an understanding of consciousness as necessarily involving division. Because, he argued, the ‘absolute I’ (absolutes Ich) or ‘pure I’ (reines Ich) becomes an empirical subject only in relation to an object (Novalis 1975–88: 2.131, no. 41), it must oppose itself in order to become conscious of itself: ‘The I is conceivable only through a Not-I [Nichtich]. An I is indeed an I only insofar as it is a Not-I—it could be whatever else it wanted, but it wouldn’t be an I’ (1975–88: 2.268, no. 562). Self-consciousness therefore presupposes the separation of the self into subject and object: ‘The I must be divided to become itself’ (1975–88: 2.127, no. 32). Thought can never be fully transparent to itself, as in the Fichtean model of intellectual intuition, because the subject, being constitutionally self-opposing, can never coincide with itself. This disjunction betrays itself in Fichte’s very statement of identity, ‘A is A’, which as the representation of the absolute necessarily divides the undivided into two: ‘The essence of identity can be presented only in an illusory proposition [Scheinsatz]. We abandon the 65

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identical in order to present it [um es darzustellen]’ (1975–88: 2.104, no. 1). Novalis thus not only rejected Fichte’s self-positing absolute subject as infinitely regressive—‘Has Fichte not too arbitrarily packed everything into the I? with what warrant? Can an I posit itself as I without another I or Not-I’ (1975–88: 2.107, no. 5)—but proclaimed the very hope of identifying an absolute grounding of philosophy, a self-evident first principle, to be futile: ‘All seeking after a single principle [nach Einem Princip] would be like an attempt to find the square of a circle’ (1975–88: 2.270, no. 566). Interpreting Novalis’s assessment of the role of philosophy is complicated by the fact that he defined it, in the much-cited entry 566 of the Fichte-Studien, by a task that he considered unachievable: Philosophy must be a unique kind of thinking. What do I do by philosophizing? I reflect upon a ground. Philosophizing is thus grounded in a striving for the thought of a ground [liegt also ein Streben nach dem Denken eines Grundes zu Grunde]. […] All philosophizing must therefore culminate with an absolute ground. Now if this were not given [nicht gegeben wäre], if this concept contained an impossibility—then the drive to philosophize would be an unending activity—and hence without end, because there would be an eternal need for an absolute ground, a need that could be satisfied only relatively—and hence would never cease. (1975–88: 2.269) Although the conditional mood of the verbs in the last sentence quoted suggests that Novalis at least entertained the possibility that an undivided, prereflective state of being was not merely a regulative idea—‘a necessary fiction’ (1975–88: 2.179: no. 234)—but, as for Hölderlin, an ontological reality, the succeeding sentences of entry 566, as well as statements elsewhere in the Fichte-Studien, emphasize the inaccessibility of this absolute to consciousness. To the extent that the absolute is thought of as a ‘pure’ state, ‘what is neither related nor relatable’, it is an ‘an empty concept—i.e., a concept to which no intuition corresponds—neither possible nor real nor necessary’, and therefore ‘a deception [Täuschung] of the imagination’ (1975–88: 2.179, no. 234). Shifting from the conditional to the indicative mood in entry 566, Novalis redefined philosophical striving in positive terms, consonant with human reality: ‘Through the voluntary renunciation of the absolute arises unending free activity [unendliche freye Thätigkeit] in us—the only possible absolute that can be given to us and that we find only through our inability to attain and know an absolute’ (1975–88: 2.269–70). Striving in thought itself becomes the manifestation of the absolute to thought. In a formulation that was to be echoed by his friend Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis asserted that ‘the authentic philosophical system’, by virtue of its free and endless activity, ‘must systematize systemlessness [Systemlosigkeit, in ein System gebracht, seyn]’ (1975–88: 2.289, no. 648; cf. Schlegel 1958: 2.173, fr. 53). Dispensing with the Fichtean first principle of intellectual intuition as the primordial identity of subject and object, Novalis thematized instead unresolvable opposition itself. Rather as Hölderlin’s Hyperion interpreted the course of his life, Novalis interpreted being, at least as far as human experience was concerned, not as stasis but as constant movement between opposites. But for him, unlike for Hölderlin, this was not a cause for lament. Hence, his paradoxical definitions of freedom and harmony: All being, being in general is nothing but being free [Freyseyn]—oscillation [Schweben] between extremes, which are necessarily to be united and necessarily to be separated. All reality streams from this point of light of oscillation—everything is contained in it […] for oscillation […] is the source, the mother of all reality, [is] reality itself. (1975–88: 2.266, no. 555) 66

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Just as unconscious feeling and conscious reflection are at once opposed and mutually dependent, since the former gives form to the latter and the latter gives content to the former (1975–88: 2.113–14, no. 15), so are truth and illusion, for exactly the same reason: ‘Illusion gets its material [Stoff ] from truth, truth its form from illusion’ (1975–88: 2.181, no. 234). As Alexander Schlutz summarizes Novalis’s argument, ‘We can only have access to truth—the pure a priori form of absolute self-consciousness—in the form of an illusion, the incomplete half (“das Halbe”) or fracture (“der Bruch”) that constitutes our empirical consciousness’ (2009: 166). Because the absolute or ‘pure I’ is only an object of longing for us—a projection of the imagination—and never an object of experience, it is not the whole from which subject and object are divided, but on the contrary is itself ‘only a part’. Its very ‘self-sufficiency’, as a regulative idea, prevents it from being a whole with respect to the empirical subject (1975–88: 2.138: no. 49). ‘Illusion [Der Schein] in our knowledge’, Novalis insisted, ‘consists in the elevation of the half to the whole—or in the halving of the indivisible’. To that extent ‘all thinking is an art of illusion [eine Kunst des Scheins]’ (1975–88: 2.180–81, no. 234). But in contrast to the philosopher’s dream of the absolute, a whole that is accessible to the empirical subject is the work of deliberately created illusion: art. Novalis’s remarks on art in the Fichte-Studien are mostly brief and cryptic, but in one passage he strikingly appropriates Fichte’s concept of the subject’s selfpositing and combines it with his own concept of philosophical striving in order to characterize the artist’s creative activity: If there is a particular presentational power [darstellende Kraft]—which presents merely for the sake of presenting—then presenting for the sake of presenting is a free presenting [ein Freyes Darstellen]. This is only to suggest that not the object as such but the I, as the cause [Grund] of the activity, should determine the activity. The work of art thereby acquires a free, autonomous, ideal character—an imposing spirit—for it is a visible product of an I—the I however posits itself specifically in this way because it posits itself as an infinite I [ein unendliches Ich]—because it must posit itself as an infinitely presenting I [ein unendlich darstellendes Ich], it posits itself as a specifically presenting I. (1975–88: 2.282–83, no. 633, Novalis’s emphases) The implication is that artistic creation, as the voluntary and unmotivated act of the subject’s presentational faculty, serves as an empirical model of that self-positing which, in the Fichtean account of intellectual intuition, remains a philosophical fiction. Art is the illusion that knows itself to be such and presents the illusoriness inherent in all thought to the empirical subject, thus achieving a self-transparency that necessarily eludes reflective consciousness. Novalis accordingly underscored the subjective contribution to art. The totality embodied in the artwork is due not to its content but to the very act of its creation: ‘The object ought to be only the seed, the type, the anchor—the formative power [bildende Kraft] creatively develops the beautiful whole [das schöne Gantze] with, in, and through it’ (1975–88: 2.282, no. 633). Art’s acceptance of its groundlessness in a philosophical sense is precisely what enables it to form a totality. Novalis’s sense of what he called Poësie, referring to all kinds of art, as a complement to philosophy, offering an empirical representation of thought itself, was to be expressed more

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explicitly in notes of 1799–1800. Here he defined poetry on the one hand as ‘true idealism—contemplation of the world, as contemplation of a vast mind—self-consciousness of the universe’, and on the other hand as the ‘presentation of the mind—of the inner world in its totality’, something already intimated for him in the fact that poetry’s medium of words ‘are the external revelation of this internal faculty [Kraftreich]’ (1975–88: 3.640, 3.650, nos. 513, 553). If poetry is externalized thought, then thought in its turn is internalized poetry, the mind’s formative power connecting things in unexpected ways to create new wholes, as Novalis elaborated in a later note, from the autumn of 1800, within the same collection: curious unities and peculiar connections emerge—and one thing [Eins] reminds us of everything—becomes the sign of many things and is itself signified and summoned up by many things. Intellect [Verstand] and imagination [Fantasie] are united through time and space in the strangest way and one can say that each thought, each phenomenon of our mind is the most individual [individuellste] part of a thoroughly individual [eigenthümlichen] whole. (1975–88: 3.650–1, no. 559) Like Hölderlin, Novalis conceived poetry and philosophy as reciprocally and productively related, poetry offering the empirical presentation of an ideal unity through which philosophy’s ‘goal and meaning’ are realized aesthetically (1975–88: 3.533, no. 31), and philosophy providing the ‘theory of poetry’ through which poetry’s achievement and value are comprehended conceptually (1975–88: 3.590–91, no. 280, Novalis’s emphasis). For that reason, he regarded the separation between the poet and the thinker to be, as he put it in a note of November or December 1798, ‘only apparent [nur scheinbar]—and to the disadvantage of both’ (1975–88: 3.406, no. 717; see also 2.531, no. 29).

5 Friedrich Schlegel In a letter of June 1797, Novalis thanked Friedrich Schlegel for assisting him to find his way through Fichte’s abstractions and to resist the ‘magic’ of that ‘most dangerous of thinkers’ (1975–88: 4.230). It is likely, however, that Novalis himself had helped stimulate Schlegel’s criticisms, which were formulated in 1796–98 after a year of publicly expressed admiration for Fichte’s foundationalist philosophy and republican politics (Beiser 2002: 437–39). That in 1798, in his periodical Athenaeum, Schlegel could still proclaim the Wissenschaftslehre one of three ‘greatest tendencies of the age’ (along with the French Revolution and Goethe’s novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre) should not be mistaken as specific endorsement of its content: as he explained in the periodical’s final issue, he meant simply that idealism is a focal point of German culture (1958: 2.198, 2.366). Although Schlegel’s philosophical development cannot be reconstructed fully since six of his notebooks from this period are lost (1958: 18.XLIV), it is evident from his surviving writings that, like Novalis, he came to criticize a reliance on a first principle and to recognize in poetry (very broadly understood) a necessary counterpart to philosophy. Already on 30 January 1797 Schlegel remarked in a letter that he had ‘decisively separated himself ’ from the Wissenschaftslehre, although his personal friendship with Fichte remained strong (1958: 23.343). Manfred Frank credits Hölderlin and Schlegel with being among ‘the first to draw aesthetic consequences from the fact that the Absolute transcended reflection’ (2004: 177); but Schlegel also sought, in a more radically sceptical manner than Hölderlin or Novalis, to accommodate philosophy to this condition by incorporating groundlessness into its very methodology. 68

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As with Novalis, Schlegel’s engagement with Fichte’s thought presents interpretive challenges because it takes the form primarily of fragmentary notes. But these notes, begun after Schlegel’s arrival in Jena in August 1796 and continued after his relocation to Berlin the following July, taken together with two published reviews from the period, allow at least the outline of a consistent critique of the Wissenschaftslehre to be discerned. Schlegel accepted that ‘the specific form of our thinking is reflection’, and that the essence of a critical philosophy like Fichte’s is ‘reflection on reflection’ (1958: 18.179, no. 643; 18.320, no. 1541). But the Wissenschaftslehre, he insisted, is insufficiently critical (1958: 18.8–9, no. 52; 18.31, no. 134; 18.47, no. 288), for it falls into dogmatism or ‘mysticism’ by reifying the transcendental subject and asserting a first principle—the unity of subject and object in the act of self-positing—that is incompatible with the conditions of knowledge (18.12, no. 52; 18.31, no. 135; 18.511, no. 64; 18.512, no. 71). Fichte’s concept of intellectual intuition assumes what Schlegel described in a notebook of 1800 as ‘potentialized reflection—a consciousness in consciousness, as it were residing one floor below’ (1958: 18.414, no. 1116), and in a review of Niethammer’s Philosophisches Journal of 1797 as ‘the totalization of reflexive abstraction [reflexen Abstraktion], a self-construction bound up with observation, the inner free intuition of selfhood [Ichheit], of self-positing, of the identity of subject and object’ (1958: 8.28). The Wissenschaftslehre is thus ‘religion in the form of philosophy’, conferring on reflection the power ‘to go in all directions to the infinite’ (1958: 18.250, nos. 679, 682; cf. 18.39, nos. 224–25). From Schlegel’s perspective, then, Fichte’s critical idealism rests on two fundamental and closely related errors. First, it confuses the transcendental, in Kant’s sense of a concern with the conditions rather than the objects of knowledge (see Kant 1900–97: 3.25, B27), with the transcendent, and thus substitutes for the empirical subject an ideal one that must be accepted on faith. Secondly, it postulates an unconditioned absolute in defiance of the fact that our knowledge is always conditioned: ‘Knowing [Erkennen] designates a conditioned knowledge [Wissen]. The unknowability of the absolute is therefore a tautological triviality [identische Trivialität]’ (1958: 18.511, no. 64). Since Fichte’s unconditioned first principle is the basis of his explanation of consciousness, it is not susceptible of explanation within the terms of the Wissenschaftslehre. Despite being more thoroughly idealist than previous philosophical systems, by virtue of trying to derive everything from the thinking subject, Fichte’s compromises its claims to knowledge by dogmatically objectifying its ground—that is, by treating an epistemologically necessary assumption as an ontological reality. Like the child pointing out the emperor’s nakedness, Schlegel, in a lecture series given in Cologne in 1804–05, declared Fichte’s ‘absolute I’ to be no more than an ‘empty illusion’ (leerer Schein) (1958: 12.147–49). From his formula ‘A = A’ one could just as easily conclude that the Not-I posits itself (1958: 18.510, no. 51). The essential issue, as Schlegel explained in the Cologne lectures, is that no philosophy can attain a positive knowledge of the absolute or infinite: ‘The cognition [Erkenntnis] of an infinite object is, like the object itself, infinite, and can never be completed, never be fully expressed in precise terms, never enclosed and comprehended within the narrow boundaries of a system’. Insofar as philosophy, in contrast to poetry, seeks to define and explain the infinite, its task is necessarily interminable: ‘it is actually more a seeking, striving towards a science [Wissenschaft] than a science itself’ (1958: 12.165–66; Schlegel’s emphases). In a completed philosophy all concepts would be transcendent and all propositions identical (1958: 18.420, no. 1199), hence inexpressible. For Schlegel, the unattainability of its goal was not an obstacle but the very condition of the possibility of philosophy: ‘we do not want and are not able to absolutely to complete philosophy’ (1958: 12.104). But how can philosophy proceed if it can neither begin from nor end at the unconditioned? 69

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In his Spinoza book, Jacobi had argued that philosophy, if consistently rationalistic (in assuming the universal applicability of the principle of sufficient reason), must be fatalistic and atheistic, and if inconsistently rationalistic (in assuming an unprovable first principle), must subordinate itself to religious faith. Schlegel addressed the second of these points towards the end of his review of Jacobi’s philosophical novel Woldemar (1796). While conceding with Jacobi that a philosophy founded on a first principle is infinitely regressive because ‘every proof presupposes something already proved’, Schlegel added that this is true of those thinkers who begin with a single proof. But there is, he suggested, another way of proceeding: ‘what if an externally unconditioned but mutually conditioned and self-conditioning reciprocal proof [Wechselerweis] were the ground of philosophy?’ (1958: 2.72).2 Developed most likely out of the concept of ‘reciprocal interaction’ (Wechselwirkung) or reciprocal determination in Kant, who applied it to the relationship between members of a community (1900–97: 3.100, 106, 111, B100, 106, 111; also 5.66), and in Fichte himself, who applied it to the relationship between the I and the not-I (1962–2012: 1/2.290–314), the Wechselerweis was meant not as a formal proof but as a plurality of principles replacing a first principle. (In notes on Fichte from 1797–98, Schlegel also used the term Wechselgrundsatz, ‘reciprocal principle’ [1958: 18.36, no. 193].) Whereas the Wissenschaftslehre, Schlegel maintained, is defined by its object, namely the relation between I and Not-I in the self-positing subject, ‘philosophy in the true sense has neither a first principle [Grundsatz] nor an object [Gegenstand] nor a determinate task’ (1958: 18.7, no. 36). On this basis, then, he differentiated his thought from Fichte’s: ‘In my system the ultimate ground is really a Wechselerweis. In Fichte’s a postulate [Postulat] and an unconditioned proposition [unbedingter Satz]’ (1958: 18.521, no. 22). Philosophy was to be understood as consisting not in a linear series of deductions from an original principle, but as a circle in which all propositions are connected to one another (1958: 18.518, no. 16). In the absence of a fixed originary principle, philosophical thought could begin with any proposition, for which reason Schlegel compared it (in a notebook and again in the Athenaeum) to epic poetry, beginning in medias res (1958: 18.518, no. 16; 2.178, fr. 84). Abandoning, by means of the Wechselerweis, the traditional standard of truth as correspondence to an external reality for one of internal coherence, ‘the mutual support of propositions in a whole’ (Beiser 2002: 446; cf. Redding 2009: 122–24), permitted Schlegel to recuperate the absolute or infinite as a goal to which knowledge always strives, rather than an unknowable principle on which knowledge is assumed to depend. In his Cologne lectures Schlegel explained the relation between finite and infinite as follows. Although philosophy may proceed from an intuition of the self, because that seems to be the one thing of which we can be certain, this intuition does not provide knowledge. When we try to fix the intuited self as an object of knowledge, it vanishes from view: ‘soul, life disappears and leaves behind only the dead, empty husk; what is supposed to be intuited here is something infinitely fluid, moving’ (1958: 12.330). Thus self-consciousness or ‘self-feeling’ (Selbstgefühl)—Schlegel uses the terms synonymously—offers only ‘the certainty of something incomprehensible [eines Unbegreiflichen]’ (1958: 12.333–34; Schlegel’s emphasis). On account of its elusiveness, ‘the entire self ’ (das ganze Ich) seems infinite to us, like the world, the heavens, and divinity—but this idea of infinity resides within us and does not come from outside us. Human thought is accordingly conditioned by the contradiction between ‘this infiniteness that we find within ourselves’ and our sense of the finiteness of life (1958: 12.334). Hence, the Wechselerweis as alternating principles of finitude and infinitude. Although this so-called proof recalls Novalis’s conception of being as oscillation, and indeed Schlegel wrote the review of Woldemar, in which he first proposed the Wechselerweis, while visiting his friend from 29 July to 6 August 1796 (Behler 1996: 386), he rejected the gerund Sein in favour of Werden, ‘becoming’, to emphasize the constant

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movement of thought: ‘a developing [werdendes] finite, which lacks all being, is absolutely mobile and mutable and therefore, in its intensive activity and manifoldness, infinite’ (1958: 12.335). What followed for Schlegel from the dynamic nature of consciousness, as he elaborated in lectures of 1800–01 in Jena, where he briefly taught philosophy after Fichte’s departure, was that ‘truth is relative’ and philosophy is historical (1958: 12.92–93). By the first claim he meant that because knowledge is always conditioned, and its pursuit can proceed ad infinitum, truth for us is necessarily relational. Truths are articulated, that is, in reference to a postulated whole—the infinite—which is itself inaccessible to consciousness: ‘One can understand everything only through and in the whole; this is only another expression of the statement, all truth is relative’ (1958: 12.94). Thought consists in ceaseless activity precisely because it cannot attain to absolute truth, a state in which all propositions would coincide and nothing would be left to know or say. Thus, Schlegel exhorted his audience, ‘we can commit ourselves with boldness and hope to speculation’, for ‘every discovery [Erfindung] is a further development [Entwickelung] of a never completed truth’ (1958: 12.93, 12.103). Because truth is relational and its method of determination is combinatorial, thought occurs not in a transcendental vacuum but in an empirical context. To understand the dynamic process of thought, and its own place within that process, philosophy must be historical in a sense that Schlegel, in his review of the Philosophisches Journal, illustrated by analogy to the practice of natural historians, who seek to elucidate ‘the inner basis’ (der innere Grund)—that is, the organizational principles—of phenomena. Natural historians recognize that organisms do not merely exist as complete systems but develop in time and must therefore be studied diachronically as well as synchronically, so that ‘the tendency of their path and the indications of their striving’ can be grasped and described (1958: 8.31–32). Philosophical systems, too, are formed as parts of a larger process that is always developing—that is, even systematic thought occurs within an historical context—and in this respect philosophy is itself historical: ‘Every combinatorial and genetic method is also historical’ (1958: 12.103; Schlegel’s emphasis). (In a letter of September 1796, Schlegel reported exasperatedly that Fichte had said ‘he would rather count peas than study history’ [1958: 23.333].) In accordance with his insistence that philosophy must acknowledge its historicity, and hence the provisionality of any given system, Schlegel offered in his Jena lectures an outline of the history of philosophy as a series of epochs with dominant characteristics, from ‘sensation’, ‘intuition’, and ‘representation’ in the past to ‘insight’ (dogmatism) and ‘reason’ (idealism) in the present and an envisioned epoch of ‘understanding’ (1958: 12.11–17). Later, in the Cologne lectures, he sought to explain in greater detail, under the rubric ‘Historical Character of Philosophy According to Its Successive Development’, ‘the emergence of different kinds of philosophy from the different ways of thinking [Denkart] that underlie them’ and the relations of one system to another (1958: 12.163; Schlegel’s emphasis). Schlegel’s contention that philosophy ‘should be thoroughly historical’, adopting an historical perspective in order to comprehend its own development, was consistent with the argument he had already advanced in an essay of 1795–96, ‘On the Value of Studying the Greeks and Romans’ (‘Vom Werth des Studiums der Griechen und Römer’), which was clearly influenced by Johann Gottfried Herder’s historicism (Behler 1990: 250–52). Characterizing the human condition as a product of the conflict between nature and freedom, the former always limiting the latter, Schlegel observed that previous attempts at general histories of the human species had lacked an organizational principle that would ‘satisfy theoretical reason no less than practical reason without offending the rights of the understanding or violating the facts of experience’ (1958: 1.626–27, 1.629). Our understanding of history must be beholden neither retrospectively to a ‘lofty prototype’ in the past nor teleologically to a ‘higher goal’ in the future, for each individual has his own purpose and each age its own value (1958: 1.640).3 Because 71

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systems of thought are always necessarily incomplete and continuously developing, there is no inherent conflict between the demands of systematicity and those of historical awareness. On the contrary, Schlegel stated in a note of 1797, ‘As soon as philosophy becomes a science [Wissenschaft], there is history. Every system is historical and vice versa’ (1958: 18.85, no. 671; cf. 18.7, no. 37). If philosophy’s goal is knowledge of the absolute, history’s is that of all individuals (1958: 18.90, no. 728), and the perfect system would comprehend the absolute and the individual equally—but no system can be perfect under the conditions of life. By historicizing itself, philosophy becomes conscious of the disjunction between the finiteness of what it can comprehend and the infiniteness what it seeks to comprehend. The paradox by which we strive to approach the truth that we recognize we cannot reach constitutes what Schlegel famously characterized as irony. In a ‘Critical Fragment’ he published in the journal Lyceum in 1797, Schlegel described irony as entailing ‘a feeling of an indissoluble conflict of the unconditioned and the conditioned, of the impossibility and necessity of a complete communication’ (1958: 2.160, fr. 108; also 2.368). Exactly because it understands every perspective to be limited, every concept to be conditioned, and every system to be incomplete, philosophy requires the regulative ideal of complete communication. In that respect philosophy is, as Schlegel put it in another Lyceum fragment, ‘the true home of irony’ (1958: 2.152, fr. 42). Formally, fragments that present themselves as such, as Schlegel’s in the Lyceum and Athenaeum do, are an expression of irony: statements that simultaneously call attention to their incompleteness while implying the existence of a larger whole (see Behler 1993: 141–53). In the same fragment 42, however, Schlegel raised the issue of the relation of poetry to philosophy when, referring to discursive manifestations of irony, he insisted that ‘poetry [Poesie] alone can also rise to the height of philosophy’ because its irony, unlike that of rhetoric, is pervasive rather than limited to isolated passages. That Schlegel endorsed, under the name of irony, self-reflexiveness in poetry no less than in philosophy, so that poetry would be ‘the poetry of poetry’ just as philosophy would be (to recall Benjamin’s phrase) the thinking of thinking (Schlegel 1958: 2.204, fr. 238), led Ernst Behler to declare flatly that the theorist ‘abolished the distinction between philosophy and poetry’ (1993: 139). To be sure, Schlegel envisioned an eventual fusion of the two and lamented that ‘even the most universal, accomplished [existing] works of isolated poetry and philosophy seem to lack this final synthesis’ (1958: 2.255, fr. 451). But in Athenaeum fragment 238, which Behler adduced on account of its describing a ‘transcendental poetry’ (Transzendentalpoesie) whose essence consists in ‘the relation between the ideal and real’, Schlegel himself conceded only an analogy to philosophy: just as we would not much value a transcendental philosophy that did not reflect critically upon itself, so too we should expect modern poetry to incorporate ‘materials and preliminaries for a poetic theory of the poetic power [einer poetischen Theorie des Dichtungsvermögens]’. This is a fusion of poetry not with philosophy but with literary theory. Maike Oergel’s argument that poetry was for Schlegel ‘the supreme medium of human understanding’, while philosophy was supposed to serve as ‘a theoretical preparation’ for the poet’s attainment of critical self-distance (2006: 80–81), seems to me correct. Such self-distance gives ‘romantic poetry’, as Schlegel famously defined it in Athenaeum fragment 116, its radical open-endedness, hovering ‘on the wings of poetic reflection between the represented and the representing’, raising reflection continually to a higher power and multiplying ‘it as in an endless series of mirrors’ (1958: 2.182–83). In its dynamic method poetic reflection certainly resembles the Wechselerweis of philosophical reflection, but its purpose is fundamentally different, even if it too must contend with the incomprehensibility of the absolute to the human mind. Whereas philosophy seeks to know, poetry seeks to represent. But Schlegel was unequivocal that the need for the latter arises from the limitations of the former: ‘Where philosophy ceases, 72

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poetry must begin. […] One should oppose to philosophy not merely unphilosophy [Unphilosophie] but poetry’ (1958: 2.261, fr. 48). Like Hölderlin and Novalis, then, Schlegel conceived Poesie (i.e., art in general) as complementing philosophy. In a lecture of 1807, he emphasized that the necessity of poetry derived from philosophy’s inability to represent the infinite (1958: 15/2.72). And in notes of 1804, he stated more specifically that ‘the impossibility of reaching the highest [das Höchste] positively through [philosophical] reflection leads to allegory’ (1958: 19.25, no. 227). Why allegory? Because the absolute can no more be represented directly than it can be known: ‘all beauty is allegory. One can speak of the highest only allegorically precisely because it is inexpressible’ (1958: 2.324). Irony manifests itself in art as allegory, a self-consciously disjunctive mode of representation that conveys a sense of something absent by means of something present, supersensible ideas by means of sensible images. Allegory is indirection. For Schlegel, as for Hölderlin and Novalis but not Schelling (1856–61: 3.627), what art represents is not the absolute itself but its elusiveness: the predicament of our relation, as finite beings in historically specific conditions, to the infinite. The ‘progressive, universal poetry’ described in Athenaeum fragment 116 becomes inexhaustibly interpretable by acknowledging that, because it can never be completed and perfected, it is constantly developing—is developmental by nature. Thus it paradoxically ‘begins to represent reality once it refuses to speak about its totality’ (Bode 2015: 32). We approach the absolute only through the infinite variety of finite and conditioned means that we know will never lead us to it.

Notes 1 2 3

Unattributed translations throughout are mine. Schlegel’s relation to Jacobi is considered more extensively in Frank (1997: 925–33). Schlegel’s historical sense does not conflict with his concept of progress because the latter ‘does not require progression to be judged in terms of approximation to ends and, in fact, forbids it’; nor does his concept of the Wechselerweis ‘commit him to a teleological picture of human cognitive development’ (Rush 2016: 47).

References Arendt, H. (1978) The Life of the Mind, Vol. 1, (ed.) M. McCarthy, New York: Harcourt. Behler, E. (1990) Herder and the Schlegel Brothers, in K. Mueller-Vollmer (ed.), Herder Today, Berlin: de Gruyter, 246–267. Behler, E. (1993) German Romantic Literary Theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Behler, E. (1996) Friedrich Schlegel’s Theory of an Alternating Principle Prior to His Arrival in Jena (6 August 1796), Revue internationale de philosophie 197: 383–402. Beiser, F. (2002) German Idealism: The Struggle against Subjectivism, 1781–1801, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Benjamin, W. (2008 [1920]) Der Begriff der Kunstkritik in der deutschen Romantik, in U. Steiner (ed.), Werke und Nachlaß, Vol. 3, Berlin: Suhrkamp. Bode, C. (2015) Absolut Jena: A Second Look at Lacoue-Labarthe’s and Nancy’s Representation of the Theory of the Frühromantik, in S. Laniel-Musitelli and T. Constantinesco (eds.), Romanticism and Philosophy: Thinking with Literature, New York: Routledge, 19–39. Davis, W. (2018) Romantic Hellenism and the Philosophy of Nature, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Dilthey, W. (1914) Einleitung in die Geiesteswissenschaften, in B. Groethuysen (ed.), Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 1, Stuttgart: Teubner. Fichte, J. G. (1962–2012) Gesamtausgabe, 42 vols., (eds.) R. Lauth and H. Jacob, Berlin: de Gruyter. Frank, M. (1989) Einführung in die frühromantische Ästhetik, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Frank, M. (1997) Unendliche Annäherung: Die Anfänge der philosophischen Frühromantik, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.

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Nicholas Halmi Frank, M. (2004) The Philosophical Foundations of Early German Romanticism, (trans.) E. Millán-Zaibert, Albany: State University of New York Press. Halmi, N. (2019) European Romanticism: Ambivalent Responses to the Sense of a New Epoch, in W. Breckman and P. Gordon (eds.), The Cambridge History of Modern European Thought, Vol. 1, 2 vols., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 40–64. Hammermeister, K. (2002) The German Aesthetic Tradition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Henrich, D. (1982) Fichte’s Original Insight, (trans.) D. Lachterman, Contemporary German Philosophy 1: 15–53. Henrich, D. (1997) The Course of Remembrance and Other Essays on Hölderlin, (ed.) E. Förster, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Hölderlin, F. (1943–85) Sämtliche Werke: Große Stuttgarter Ausgabe, 15 vols., (ed.) F. Beissner, Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. Kant, I. (1900–97) Gesammelte Schriften, 29 vols., (eds.) W. Dilthey et al., Berlin: Reimer/de Gruyter. Kaulbach, F. (1969) Immanuel Kant, Berlin: de Gruyter. Neuhouser, F. (1990) Fichte’s Theory of Subjectivity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Novalis (1975–88) Schriften, 5 vols., 3rd ed., (eds.) R. Samuel and H.-J. Mähl, Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. Oergel, M. (2006) Culture and Identity: Historicity in German Literature and Thought 1770–1815, Berlin: de Gruyter. Pinkard, T. (2002) German Philosophy 1760–1860: The Legacy of Idealism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Redding, P. (2009) Continental Idealism: Leibniz to Nietzsche, Abingdon: Routledge. Reinhold, K. L. (2007–) Gesammelte Schriften, 10 vols. to date, (ed.) M. Bondeli, Basel: Schwabe. Rush, F. (2016) Irony and Idealism: Rereading Schlegel, Hegel, and Kierkegaard, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schelling, F. W. J. (1856–61) Sämmtliche Werke, 14 vols., (ed.) K. F. A. Schelling, Stuttgart: Cotta. Schlegel, F. (1958–) Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe, 35 vols. to date, (ed.) E. Behler, Paderborn: Schöningh. Schlutz, A. (2009) Mind’s World: Imagination and Subjectivity from Descartes to Romanticism, Seattle: University of Washington Press.

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6 PURE AND IMPURE THINKING IN HEGEL’S ENCYCLOPEDIA Markus Gabriel

1 Introduction The question, what is thinking, or rather, what is philosophical thinking, is at the core of various lines of debate in post-Kantian philosophy. In this chapter, I want to explore Hegel’s most developed, mature account of the nature of philosophical thinking which he presents in the Encyclopedia. Given that the Encyclopedia is the only complete presentation of his philosophical system, there are good reasons to treat its account of the nature of philosophical thinking as a key to understanding the notion of pure, logical thinking. In what follows, among other things, I want to respond to a recent proposal by Robert Pippin, who puts the logic at the centre of Hegel’s enterprise (Gabriel 2020a; Pippin 2018, 2020). For Pippin, ‘[p]ure thinking, after all, is simply another term for philosophy; even philosophy about the limitations of philosophy or pure thinking is itself pure thinking, empirically unaided thought’ (2020: 440–41). I will argue that Pippin misses several crucial points of the structure of the system and that he misidentifies the role of logic and, therefore, pure thinking within it. After all, the logic deals with a ‘realm of shadows’,1 essentially in need of content that by its very nature cannot be derived by any exercise of the capacity for pure thinking. In my reconstruction of Hegel’s account of pure and impure (empirically-grounded) thinking in the Encyclopedia, I will first explore the distinction between ‘thinking over [Nachdenken]’ (2010a: sec. 2, 30) and a ‘thoughtful examination of object [denkende Betrachtung der Gegenstände]’ (2010a: sec. 2, 28, translation modified) in the introduction and show how there is no access to ‘the pure region of concepts’ (2010a: sec. 3, 31) without a transformation of empirical content into thoughts. All thinking is empirically aided in that sense. In the second section of this chapter, I will focus on Enc., secs. 465–68 where Hegel introduces thinking in the context of the philosophy of subjective spirit. The third and final section will look at the underdiscussed concluding paragraphs of the Encyclopedia, in which Hegel himself provides us with the concept of philosophy on the level of absolute spirit. There, Hegel presents his doctrine of the three syllogisms of philosophy, which is straightforwardly incompatible with Pippin’s view that philosophy is pure thinking, i.e., empirically unaided thought. One of the main achievements of the Encyclopedia is that it delivers Hegel’s overall solution to the form-content-problem (on this, see Gabriel 2015b). The logic intends to show that there is purely logical content, ‘objective thoughts’ (2010a: sec. 24, 58), meaning the discipline of logic 75

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cannot be understood along the lines of a form of psychological training that allows us to regiment our thought processes. This leaves open the question of the relationship between pure thinking and its thoughts, on the one hand, and empirical reality, on the other hand. That issue simply cannot be solved within the logic alone. The Realphilosophie is thus not some kind of appendix to pure thinking, but its ‘corroboration [Bewährung]’ (2010a: sec. 12, 41), to introduce an important Hegelian term. Pure thinking needs to be verified and probed in light of its capacity to engage with empirical, yet scientifically structured content. Empirical, yet scientifically structured content is delivered by the natural sciences. In the Realphilosophie, Hegel derives the conceptual framework for thinking about the architecture of empirical content so as to demonstrate that there is no incompatibility between empirical and pure thinking. However, this procedure of validation precisely does not insulate pure from impure thinking. Pure thinking must not dwell in the realm of shadows unoccupied by empirical reality and the progress of the empirical sciences.

2 The introduction to the Encyclopedia Right at the outset of the Encyclopedia, Hegel lets us know that philosophy ‘may initially be defined as the thoughtful examination of objects’ (2010a: sec. 2, 28). The objects of philosophy are concepts, i.e., ways of thinking about objects. Philosophy differs from other scientific investigations in being essentially about ways of thinking about objects, whereas physics, say, is directly about objects whose nature it is not to be thoughts. Let us call those objects ‘nonthoughts’. The philosophy of nature, then, gives an account of the structure of thought about non-thoughts. It thereby differs from the philosophy of spirit, which explores the architecture of thought directed at itself and culminates in a defence of our capacity as finite, embodied thinkers to grasp pure, logical thoughts. Any account of pure thinking needs to be able to accommodate the fact that we are able to have access to that level of thinking. Otherwise, there would be room for an unbridgeable gap, ‘a limit which completely separates the two [schlechthin scheidende Grenze]’ (Hegel 2018: 49) between finite, embodied thinkers and their thoughts insofar as they aim to incorporate acts of pure thinking. This is one of the central lessons of the Phenomenology of Spirit whose function as an introduction to the stance of philosophical thinking is performed by the Introduction together with the ‘preliminary conception [Vorbegriff]’ of the Encyclopedia (see Fulda 1975). Hegel’s response to the worry that we might not be able to move in the realm of shadows, because of a metaphysical difference between our thought and some divine or absolute thought, draws on the concept of ‘thinking over’. Literally, the term means thinking which comes after empirically contentful feelings and representations. Hegel also calls it ‘translation [Übersetzen]’, which is a transformation of empirically contentful feelings and representations into thoughts: ‘At any rate, thinking them over has at least this effect, namely, that of transforming the feelings, representations, etc. into thoughts’ (2010a: sec. 5, 32). Given that there is no philosophy without such a translation, Hegel leaves no doubt that its content must not radically differ from that of ‘experience’, i.e., empirical content. On the other hand, it is just as important that philosophy come to understand that its content [Inhalt] is none other than the basic content [Gehalt] that has originally been produced and reproduces itself in the sphere of the living spirit, a content turned into a world, namely the outer and inner world of consciousness, or that its content is actuality. We call the immediate consciousness of this content experience. (2010a: sec. 6, 33) 76

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There is just one overall content of thought (be it pure or impure) and different modes of grasping it, different forms. In the Introduction, Hegel emphasizes that religion and philosophy have the same content, namely God, which can be tentatively translated into the totality of what can be grasped in thought. ‘God’ is Hegel’s title for the essential thinkability of absolutely everything, which in his view requires precisely that philosophy does not stop short of the empirical facts. It needs to be in a position to demonstrate that no empirical finding of any kind is suitable for undermining self-reflexive thought. Roughly, the reason for this line of thought is familiar from debates about scepticism: If there were an empirical finding that undermined our capacity to think about thought itself, that finding would have to be integrated into thought thinking itself as alleged evidence against its very possibility. We can think of this basic idealist insight as a version of a principle of intelligibility at work and justified in and by the logic (Gabriel 2016). However, it is not sufficient to argue that there cannot in principle be any empirical finding that undermines our capacity to think about thought itself. This still leaves open the question of the relationship between the form and content of pure thinking and the form and content of impure thinking. As long as we do not know that the principle of intelligibility equally applies to pure and to empirical thinking, we have not ruled out that there might be a gap between our actual thinking as finite, embodied thinkers and pure thinking (see Gabriel 2015c: 338–58). This issue whether the principle applies to impure thinking as well as to pure thinking has not been resolved by the argument that it is precluded in principle for there to be an empirical finding that undermines pure thought’s capacity to know itself. For this does rule out a scenario where finite, embodied thinkers are separated from their own minds in virtue of empirically detectable obstacles whose specific organization undercuts the realization of pure thinking under conditions accessible to us. The Logic cannot demonstrate that this is not the case due to its inherent limitation. The principle of intelligibility turns out to apply differently between pure and impure modes of thinking, which is why there is no one-to-one linear correspondence of the different forms of dialectic known from the Logic to the domains of the Realphilosophie (see Rometsch 2007; Schäfer 2001). The operation of philosophical thinking in the Realphilosophie is itself a form of impure thinking, which gradually validates its own actuality through investigations guided by empirically given content. The highest goal of philosophy does not reside in the logic, but in the systematic justification of our capacity to grasp objective thoughts both on the level of logical and on the level of empirical content. Since philosophy differs only in form from other ways of becoming conscious of this same identical content, its agreement with actuality and experience is a necessity. Indeed, this agreement may be regarded as at least an outward touchstone of the truth of a philosophy, just as it has to be seen as the highest goal of the philosophical science to bring about the reconciliation of the reason that is conscious of itself with the reason that exists, or with actuality, through the cognition of this agreement. (2010a: sec. 6, 33, translation slightly modified) The ‘highest goal’ of philosophy is the reconciliation of self-conscious, pure thinking with its realization conditions. One of its realization conditions is that there be feeling, imagination, representation and other faculties of finite, subjective spirit without which we could not so much as understand the expression of logical thought. Logical thought’s purity, therefore, cannot reside in its isolation from or transcendence over impure thinking. For this reason, impure thinking avoids the worries having to do with ‘any model of application or imposition 77

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of the Logic’ (Pippin 2020: 443) that Pippin invokes (without explaining what the supposed problem of application or imposition consists in). One reason to be worried about application or imposition resides precisely in the shortcoming of a form-content-dualism in which logical content turns into a form unable to be permeated by empirical content. Yet this is precisely what I object to in Pippin’s insistence on pure thinking, because he does not realize that the Realphilosophie is philosophy as well and not a ‘manifestation of the Concept in what is other than thinking’ (Pippin 2020: 443). Evidently, if there is a Realphilosophie, which Pippin does not doubt, philosophy cannot be identical to exercises of pure thinking. Philosophy cannot be empirically aided in general. This does not settle the issue whether Hegelian logic, unlike Hegelian philosophy, is isolated from Hegel’s famous claim that philosophy ‘is its own time comprehended in thoughts’ (1991: 21). The fact that Hegel himself reworked the Logic and added some changes to it in its Encyclopedia version is evidence for a reading according to which no accessible content (including purely logical content) is, as such, immune from revision. We simply are not God, not even in the best exercises of our capacity to engage in acts of pure thinking, and it is not clear how Pippin accommodates this fact in his austere understanding of pure thinking. As a matter of fact, his identification of logic and philosophy erects a barrier between infinite (pure) and finite (impure) thinking in such a way that it is hard to see which kind of method would be available to us, finite thinkers, in our attempts to achieve novel logical insights. Famously, Hegel has a complicated story to tell about this which involves his ambitious attempt to write the entire history of philosophy as a historical unfolding of logical thought-determinations, a crucial dimension of the Hegelian system missing in Pippin’s reading (see, among many other important sources, Beierwaltes 2004; Dangel 2013; Düsing 1983; Heidemann and Krijnen 2007). Hegel himself explicitly discusses the relationship of speculative science (i.e., the entire Encyclopedia) and the other sciences in at least the following two passages. In the remark to Enc., sec. 9 he maintains: To that extent, the relationship of the speculative to the other sciences is merely this, namely that the former does not simply set aside the empirical content of the latter, but instead acknowledges and uses it; that it likewise acknowledges and utilizes as its own content the universal produced by these sciences, such as their laws, genera, etc.; and furthermore that it introduces into those categories others as well and validates them. (2010a: sec. 9, 37)2 And in Enc., sec. 12 he describes the relationship between the universality of thought and the empirical sciences in the following terms: Conversely, the empirical sciences provide the stimulus to conquer the form in which the wealth of their content is offered only as something that is merely immediate and simply found, as a manifold of juxtaposition, and hence as something altogether contingent, and to elevate this content to [the level of] necessity. This stimulus tears thinking away from that universality and the implicitly assured satisfaction and impels it to the development from out of itself. Such development consists on the one hand merely in taking up the content and its given determinations and at the same time bestowing upon them, on the other hand, the shape of a content that emerges purely (in the sense of original thinking) in accordance with the necessity of the subject matter itself. (2010a: sec. 12, 40, translation slightly modified) 78

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There are, thus, at least three levels in this account: the philosophical sciences, the empirical sciences, and experience. The genetic starting point is (sense) experience, which is possible only in virtue of the presence of embodied thinkers in nature. Reality presents itself to embodied thinkers in a particular (species-specific) way in virtue of their mode of processing what there is. This mode of processing presents reality as a bunch of largely unconnected events, as ‘a manifold of juxtaposition [nebeneinander gestelltes Vielfaches]’. The second level is empirical science. The sciences draw on patterns to be found in the sensuously mediated manifold and, on the basis, formulate laws of nature, of subjective and objective spirit, i.e., of the individual human mind and institutional social structures. Another crucial difference between the empirical sciences and Realphilosophie lies in their respective modal architecture: Physics, to use one example, provides us with patterns connecting spatio-temporal processes, and need not give an account of the success conditions of mathematical symbolism. In this sense, it cannot validate the applicability of modal vocabulary (paradigmatically: necessity, possibility, and contingency) to nature within the scope of its investigation (see the illuminating philosophical reconstruction of Hegelian metaphysics in Koch 2014). The role of a philosophy of nature in this picture consists in providing empirically informed understanding of structure in nature with a logically robust modal apparatus which delivers the right kind of epistemology and metaphysics of science. The main criterion is an assumption of overall metaphysical coherence: the principle of intelligibility which has been derived from the Logic (and which goes by the name of the Idea) cannot be in conflict with the conditions of intelligibility of empirical content. However, it is not simply a priori that the Idea is present in empirical thinking and empirical reality alike. This needs to be demonstrated in a proper way within the Realphilosophie, a task that cannot be fulfilled by the Logic alone. In this sense, the Logic depends on the Realphilosophie, as it would remain incomplete, a realm of shadows, if it could not be shown that empirical reality corresponds to the concept, i.e., is intelligible in principle as well as in actual scientific practice. For this reason, Hegel’s metaphysics of science cannot be reduced to so many exercises of pure thinking. Impure thinking is essential for the very emergence of pure thinking in empirical reality, embodied by thinkers who are capable of grasping Hegelian objective thoughts, which are relevantly similar to Fregean propositions avant la lettre (see Brandom 2019: 50–62). It is not enough to know that there are purely logical propositions graspable by some idealized thinker, if it cannot be secured that finite, embodied thinkers are capable of discovering propositional structure in empirical reality. And this cannot be secured if we cannot deliver a proof of what an ideal thinker could grasp; a proof conducted by finite creatures, who thereby grasp purely logical propositions on the basis of impure thinking.

3 Subjective thought The topic of thinking returns at several junctures of the Encyclopedia. In particular, Hegel dedicates Enc., secs. 465–68 to thinking as a mental faculty, i.e., as a topic of the philosophy of subjective spirit (which roughly corresponds to philosophy of mind in the contemporary mainstream sense of the term).3 In his philosophy of spirit, Hegel draws a distinction between ‘intelligence’ and ‘will’. Intelligence is his name for the subjectivity of thought, will for its objectivity. Subjectivity culminates in the notion of thinking: ‘the thinking of intelligence is having thoughts; they serve as the content and object of intelligence’ (2007: sec. 465, 202). Thinking in general is grasping thoughts. Those thoughts are objective in the sense of graspables 79

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or thinkables. The act of thinking does not produce thoughts. The thoughts are rather ‘the thing [die Sache]’ (2007: sec. 465, 202) i.e., what is thinkable and, if actually thought in the right way, knowable. Subjective thought is subjective in the precise sense of relying on the givenness of some content it has not produced. Thinkables are not produced by the act of thinking, they are rather found. Otherwise, the subjectivity of the act of thinking would potentially undermine the minimal contrast of objectivity according to which there would not be any thinkables if taking something to be the case and its being the case coincided in general. Subjective thought, by its nature, is fallible. Not all thinking is pure thinking. Finite, impure (empirically informed) thinking is a necessary element of our path to pure thinking. As Hegel puts it in Enc. sec. 466: But thinking cognition is likewise initially formal; the universality and its being is the simple subjectivity of intelligence. The thoughts are thus not yet determined in and for themselves, and the representations recollected to thinking are to that extent still the content given. (2007: sec. 466, 203) In this context, Hegel distinguishes three levels of thinking: understanding (Verstand), judgment (Urteil), and reason (formelle Vernunft, schließender Verstand).4 Understanding identifies structures in (empirically) given content that allow us to identify joints in nature, ‘genera, species, laws, forces’ (2007: sec. 467, 203). Judgment bridges the gap between the empirically given and its form in thought by thinking of a given individual process as an example of a kind, as falling under a concept. Understanding already involves categorisation of empirically available episodes into patterns (genera, species, etc.), and it thereby delivers objects to thinking. Judgment pushes thinking to another level where it realizes that patterns are essentially repeatable so that we can reuse elements from a given sensory episode in other contexts. However, this is not yet sufficient for thinking. Notoriously, Hegel argues that the form of judgment invites the mistake of thinking of reality as a bunch of individuals to be brought under concepts. However, that would re-iterate the problematic dualism between pure form and empirical content Hegel sees at work in Kant. This is why the inference, i.e., syllogism is the form in which content turns out to be logical. A series of single, categorical judgments of the form that a given individual is an instance of some kind, does not yet demonstrate the intelligibility of reality. Rather, focusing on judgment as the paradigmatic form of thinking precisely invites a subject-objectdistinction according to which thinking is primarily or paradigmatically ‘empirically unaided’. Only if we take into account that inferences articulate relationships between empirically given contents that are modally robust, are we in a position to overcome the dualism of pure thinking and thoughtless sensuous representation—a line of thought Brandom gets exactly right in his inferentialist reading of the role of alethic modal vocabulary in Hegel. In the remark to Enc. sec. 467, Hegel points out that purely logical thinking is deficient as long as it does not expose itself to review in the face of empirical content. Given that sensuous representation cannot be entirely thoughtless and that we cannot think of sensuous representation as conceptual (in any relevant sense) unless we have room for empirical concepts, it is not sufficient for a respectable kind of conceptualism about sensory content to reduce it to a point about our capacity for explicit self-conscious thought available in the operations of sensibility. Empirical content requires empirical concepts and it is part and parcel of their very nature that they cannot derived from logical principles.

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In logic, thinking appears in its initial implicit form and as the unopposing medium in which reason develops. Thinking also occurs as a stage in consciousness (see sec. 437 Remark). Here reason becomes the truth of the opposition as it had determined itself within the mind itself. (2007: sec. 467, 204) Consciousness is a mode of thinking corresponding to the logical form of judgment. In consciousness, reality is processed under the assumption that it fundamentally consists of individual objects that differ from each other in virtue of their mutually incompatible sets of properties. The relationship between objects on this level of analysis consists in a network of entities. Here, as throughout his work, Hegel draws on the famous philosophical ‘etymology’ of the German word for judgment, Ur-teil, which he often translates into Latin as ‘diremption’. A judgment is a partitioning of reality into separate glimpses. Objects are thought of entities categorically differing from concepts, canonized in the standard reading of the Fregean ontological difference of concepts and objects. On this score, objects essentially satisfy open quasi-sentential, conceptual structures such as __ is a horse or more complex concepts of a higher adicity, such as ___ is taller than ___. Objects thus make up the catchment area of concepts, which are not themselves legitimate denizens of object-level reality. While this mainstream Fregean division of labour apparently serves the useful job of avoiding third-man-style regresses, it immediately invites famous worries concerning the unity of the proposition, as it is hard to see how object-level entities (i.e., objects) can be combined with higher-level structure into thinkables (Fregean) propositions. If thinking boils down to grasping judgment-like propositional structure, it becomes increasingly difficult to see how an embodied thinker manages to get in contact with an ontological architecture that is all by itself on the verge of incoherence, as it remains necessary to account for the alleged fact that object-level entities fall under higher-order structures. How can a given horse fall under something that is not even in the same realm, but belongs to a more ethereal space of timeless concepts? To the extent to which he limited himself to his main objective, giving an account of the ontology of mathematical thought, Frege himself need not even address these issues. If we separate our account of what it is for an object to fall under a concept from the question how an embodied thinker can be in touch with a level characterized by the spirit of Fregean conceptual realism, we cannot ever hope to understand how objects and concepts can combine in a proposition. Frege himself ignored the middleground between his extreme version of conceptual realism, according to which the notion of a thought (Gedanke) is as such isolated from a notion of what is graspable by us, and psychologism which thinks of the unity of the proposition as a mental synthesis performed by embodied thinkers so that there is not sufficient room for full-blown objectivity. Hegel occupies that middle-ground. In his account of pure thinking, the function of judgment is only the second out of three moments. It allows for the establishment of a relationship between given objects and the intelligibility conditions laid out in the Logic, as thinking is able to isolate the highest-level concepts operative in any understanding from the specific sensuous encounter with what there is. Qua judgment, pure thinking is an act of abstraction: It separates layers of generality from each other in a given encounter with what there is. But this means that there is no judgment-like exercise of pure thinking without a given content (regardless of whether the content is logical or empirical).5 The third level (Stufe) of pure thinking is second-order knowledge, knowledge of knowledge qua our capacity to grasp reality as it is in itself from a human standpoint. This third level cannot be achieved by the Logic alone, as it does not yet incorporate the very concept of empirical reality as nature and spirit. This is its deficiency, not its glory. The function of the Realphilosophie is the actual demonstration of the intelligibility of being: Natural and spiritual 81

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reality turn out to be intelligible, despite the fact that they are, as the saying goes, to some extent ‘mind-independent’. Hegel calls this character of empirical reality its ‘subsisting-for-itself [Fürsichbestehen]’ (2007: sec. 467, 205), which means the relevant independence from the act of thinking required for the latter to have truth-apt content. At this stage, let me summarize the line of thought about thinking operative in Enc. sec. 467 in a more reconstructive fashion, so as to make philosophical sense of the dense passages typical of the mode of expression of the Encyclopedia. In general, the philosophy of subjective spirit deals with human mental faculties in light of their contribution to our epistemological capacity for achieving knowledge about knowledge (Gabriel 2019a, 2020b). For Hegel (as for Plato and Aristotle, who are his main philosophical sources here), knowledge is non-accidentally true thought both about a relevantly mind-independent reality and about knowledge about said reality itself. Knowledge is thus not essentially about an objective reality in the sense of a reality consisting entirely of mind-independent objects or facts. Knowledge claims cannot be executed unless we command a whole array of mental faculties whose function it is to make sense of our being in touch with both a mind-independent reality and the reality of mind itself. For this simple reason, knowledge claims pertaining to the architecture of logical forms and, thus, the science of logic itself, cannot be carried out by us if we cannot identify an available cognitive standpoint from which we can get logical form in sight. This standpoint is what Hegel calls ‘pure thinking’. 1.

The first condition for the achievement of such a standpoint is an overall capacity for abstraction. ‘Abstraction’ is a prerequisite for drawing a distinction between what pertains to logical form in a given empirical content and what is contingent in light of logical form. For example, it is not essential for Socrates’ mortality in the logically relevant thought that ‘Socrates is mortal’ that Socrates sometimes wears a pair of shoes he acquired in some neighbourhood in Athens. Socrates’ morality and my mortality need to be the same kind of mortality if they can both serve as examples of human mortality. Thus, Socrates’ specific circumstances of owning a pair of shoes as well as his cause of death do not matter for the validity conditions of a logical form connecting Socrates and me in a thought designed to articulate our essential mortality as examples of a shared human fate. Without abstraction, there could not be any identifiable logical form. Therefore, whatever mental faculty is required in human, embodied thinking to perform the exercise of abstraction cannot be entirely accidental for the realization of logical form in non-logical content. This thought alone should demonstrate the ontological dependence of the logical realm of shadows on performances by finite thinkers, which does not at all conflict with, let alone undermine, Hegel’s infamous claim that the Logic deals with God as the eternal truth, a claim he makes in the introduction to the Science of Logic and repeats in the Encyclopedia, the last word of which does not just accidentally happen to be God: θεός (2007: 277).6 There is no categorical, let alone metaphysical, difference between human finite thinking and pure thinking. Contrary to Pippin’s accusation, my reading does not at all reflect ‘a widespread dissatisfaction with Hegel’ (2020: 440), where ‘Hegel’ here refers to his Hegel. Rather, my point is that pure thinking is just not distinct from human finite thinking in the way Pippin assumes, which, as I have argued here and elsewhere, burdens readings like his with the unsolvable problem that they create a gap between us and pure thinking. In this way, the Hegelian method turns out to be magical after all, as we are not able to reconstruct the transitions in the movement of the concept from any point of view that is actually available to us. Human thinking is a form of pure thinking operative in the lives of finite, embodied minds. The realm of shadows manifests itself in the light of day: Actuality in no 82

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way stands in opposition to logical form, which means that it ought to be recognized as an unavoidable, constitutive supplement to the Logic. Pure thinking cannot be realized without impure thinking, there is no Logic without Realphilosophie. 2.

The fact that pure and impure thinking are both species of the same genus, namely thinking, means that thinking can be distinguished into a manifold of forms. Drawing a distinction between various levels of thought, one which is capable of dealing with itself (in the ideal form of knowledge about knowledge) and another one which is essentially directed at the mind-independent layer of reality, is a judgment in Hegel’s technical sense. A judgment, according to Hegel’s technical concept, is not primarily the articulation or expression of a thought of the form that a given, mind-independent object has a property it potentially shares with other objects. The categorical form of a judgment: a is F where a is an object-level entity (in Frege’s sense) and F a concept-function which corresponds to an open sentence in our language, cannot exhaust the nature of judgment. Otherwise, we would immediately run into the famous Fregean problem of the nonsensical proposition (see Frege 1997: 185): (Horse) The concept horse is not a concept. Notoriously, in Frege’s division of labour, nothing which satisfies a concept-function can be a concept, but has to be an object. This seems to imply that we cannot predicate anything of concepts, at least not in the standard categorical form Fx. To be sure, there is a lot of room for a Fregean to find various solutions to this problem. What matters in the Hegelian context is that none of the solutions takes into account the case in which a finite thinker grasps herself as a thinker such that we can understand that a given, finite act of thinking falls under the concept of pure thinking. The form of judgment both separates the given from its categorical form (abstraction) and joins them in a single thought. The given is not merely given, but given as a case of a more general structure. For Hegel, then, there is a relevant contrast between (1) thinking of Mont Blanc as merely being the object of an intuition or perception and (2) thinking of Mont Blanc as a mountain. However, Mont Blanc, the same mountain, is involved in both thoughts. The first thought thinks of it as being, the second as an individual falling under a concept. On the level of pure thinking, that very distinction turns out to be one drawn within thought itself. The capacity to draw a distinction between Mont Blanc, the mindindependent visible object over there, and Mont Blanc as one of the mountains, is a manifestation of the ‘infinite negativity within itself ’ (Hegel 2007: sec. 467, 203). We do not need to transcend the realm of pure thinking in order to ascribe to ourselves the mental faculties required in order to be causally in touch with a mountain ‘out there’, as though there was some kind of gap between the conceptual and the empirical, between mind and world to be bridged. The intentionality of thought is not a form of transcendence, but an exercise of pure thinking in empirical content, which is not produced by what Hegel calls ‘the intelligence’, but found. Full recognition of givenness as an unsurmountable, nay necessary requirement of any relevant exercise of pure thinking involves an insight into judgment as diremption: Pure thinking is not merely self-directed, but at the same time directed at non-thought, paradigmatically at nature (see the impressive study by Hoffmann 2003). What is in itself not itself an act of thinking can nevertheless be thinkable.

3.

However, judgment is still a deficient form of thinking about thinking. In judgment, ‘the content appears as given’ (Hegel 2007: sec. 467, 204). The next step is inference (Schluß). In 83

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this context, Hegel does not merely repeat his basic inferentialist insight from the Logic, masterfully delineated by Brandom (2019). According to the basic inferentialist insight, the reference of singular terms can be reconstrued as a function of the presence of a battery of concepts which hang together in a meshwork of propositions. The glue of the meshwork is inferences which allow us to move from nodes in the network to other nodes in the network. Singular terms can be placed at nodes which are necessary conditions for making sense of inference. To put it in Brandom’s helpful explanatory conceptual framework: The notion of object-level entities (out there) is sense-dependent on the concept of singular terms inserted in complete propositions, which in turn is sense-dependent on the concept of inferences. Propositional content is essentially part of a structure of other propositional contents. We cannot glue propositions together by more propositions, but have to understand that there is some vocabulary whose function is not to refer to anything out there, but to stabilize the very idea of reference by allowing for re-identification of the same object in utterly different stimulus environments. Mont Blanc looks different at night than at day, but is the same object, the mountain designated by the proper name ‘Mont Blanc’. In the paragraphs on thinking, Hegel operates on the meta-level of this basic inferentialist insight, which—by his own counting—is the third level. The first is intuition, i.e., perceptually based reference. The second is judgment, which articulates the structure of perceptually based reference. The third is inference, whereby we grasp ourselves as thinkers whose exercises of pure thinking both put us in touch with a reality out there and the reality of thinking said reality. The concept of a reality out there turns out to be sense-dependent on our capacity to think about it, to at least sometimes get it right. The fact that there is a reality out there, which Hegel himself sometimes calls an ‘external world [Außenwelt]’ (for instance, 2007: sec. 348 addition, sec. 355 addition and elsewhere), is no obstacle to its thinkability. Knowing this is a form of knowing something about knowledge. This way of thinking about reality as essentially thinkable, corresponds to the standpoint of Hegelian absolute idealism. The additional element derived in the philosophy of subjective spirit and not yet covered by the Logic alone is the very presence of thoughts directed at a reality out there. Purely logical thinking does not deal with the presence of a reality out there. The Logic is a path towards pure self-reference. At the end of this path, pure self-reference turns out to be deficient, as it does not guarantee that it be realized under conditions not derived from itself. The goal of the philosophy of nature is to give an account of the emergence of finite thinkers, to deliver a ‘transcendental ontology’, as I call it (see Gabriel 2011, 2013, 2014, 2015a, 2020a). Yet this, too, is not the end of the story. It is not enough to show that nature does not, as it were, repel thinking, so that we can equip ourselves with the notion that thinkers somehow emerge from suitable arrangements and transformations of natural elements. For this does not yet show that those thinkers are capable of achieving a proper self-referential insight into their very capacity for reconstructing the path of their diachronous and synchronous emergence (see Gabriel 2020c, secs. 6–11). In order to give an account both of the emergence of thinkers (an account of embodiment) and to vindicate their actual insight into the conceptual, scientific architecture of this account, the philosophy of subjective spirit needs to analyse our mental endowment. The highest point is the derivation of a system of concepts: besides logical concepts, we do not merely have empirical concepts directed at nature, but also self-referential concepts, which form a mentalistic vocabulary whose highest point is the concept of knowledge, i.e., knowledge of knowledge (see Gabriel 2011, 2019b). Knowledge of knowledge cannot be reduced to pure thinking in Pippin’s sense of ‘empirically unaided thought’, as there simply is no such thing. Empirically 84

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unaided thought would be unthinkable for us and, therefore, cannot actually exist. It would lie on the other side of an internal gap in thinking, a problem already dealt with by Fichte under the heading of a ‘hiatus irrationalis’ (Fichte 2005: 119) separating thinking from itself. That we have an architecture of mental faculties that allows us to grasp logical and empirical concepts and deploy them in inferences so as to articulate potentially successful knowledge claims is not a priori. Facticity is not a limit to philosophical thinking, but one of its indispensable realization conditions.7

4 The three syllogisms of philosophy (Enc. secs. 574–577) Any reconstruction of Hegel’s concept of philosophy should evidently consider his official account of philosophy at the very end of the Encyclopedia.8 The system concludes with the doctrine of the three syllogisms presented in the last three paragraphs of the book (2007: secs. 575–77) and prepared in sec. 574. Hegel leaves no doubt that philosophy is not identical to pure thinking, thought thinking itself, when he specifies the concept of philosophy in the following unambiguous words: This concept of philosophy is the self-thinking Idea, the knowing truth (sec. 236), the logical with the meaning that it is the universality verified [bewährte Allgemeinheit] in the concrete content as in its actuality. (2007: sec. 574, 275) He goes on to inform us that the logical turns out to be the spiritual, as a result of philosophy itself. This corresponds to the first of the three syllogisms presented in Enc., sec. 575. Let ‘L’ be the logical, ‘N’ nature and ‘S’ spirit. The first syllogism has the order L-N-S and it corresponds to the notion that there is a transition from logical form via nature to spirit: ‘The logical becomes nature and nature becomes mind’ (2007: sec. 575: 276). The overwhelming majority of commentators on Hegel’s system (Schelling included) take only this movement into consideration. According to this movement, the absolute idea at the end of the Logic somehow constitutes a mysterious resolve which results in the extra-logical transition into a different, empirical vocabulary. On this construal, deployment of empirical vocabulary is sufficiently logically informed so as to yield natural-scientific insight into the architecture of natural reality. This leads to a conceptual order which allows us to produce models of the emergence of mindedness via the arrangement of elements and the organization of animals endowed with neural tissue and so forth until we reach a layer of further emergence which constitutes the historically unfolding mind and so forth. This account of philosophy credits only the Logic with full, philosophically articulated selfreference, as it can precisely not inform us how and why there would be a necessary, conceptually articulated relationship between the three parts of the system. The systematic, scientific part of the system would be limited to its first part.9 The second syllogism of philosophy has the form: N-L-S. This syllogism corresponds to the perspective generated by thinking in the philosophy of subjective spirit. The finite, embodied mind of a thinker present in nature presupposes the existence of nature as facticity and successfully identifies logical form in nature by way of abstraction, judgment, and inference in order to achieve the self-referential insight characterized earlier. The second syllogism is ‘the standpoint of the mind’ (2007: sec. 576, 276) according to which philosophy ‘appears as a subjective cognition, whose aim is freedom and which is itself the way to produce its freedom’ (2007: sec. 576, 276). The very structure of the second syllogism disproves Pippin’s 85

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(unargued for) assumption that Hegelian philosophy is empirically unaided. The very point of the second syllogism is to integrate empirical knowledge (claims) into the architecture of philosophical knowledge. Otherwise, there could not even be a system of ‘philosophical sciences’ in the plural, as there would only be one philosophical science, i.e., the Logic. The form of the third and final syllogism is: R S

N

‘R’, the middle term, here is ‘self-knowing reason’ (2007: sec. 577, 276). In this paragraph, Hegel equates the idea with self-knowing reason and introduces the notion that the idea splits itself (sich-urteilen) ‘into the two appearances’ (2007: sec. 577, 276), i.e., into spirit and nature. This is the crucial, concluding thought of the system. There is no purely logical idea separated from the empirical realms of nature and spirit in such a way that the issue of a transition arises. Nature and spirit are appearances of the idea. Arguably, Hegel here draws on Schelling’s ontology in the Freedom Essay.10 Towards the end of his famous text, Schelling argues that the absolute splits itself into two principles, which correspond to nature and spirit in Hegel: But the non-ground divides itself [teilt sich] into the two equally eternal beginnings, only so that the two, which could not exist simultaneously or be one in it as the nonground, become one through love, that is, it divides itself only so that there may be life and love and personal existence. (Schelling 2006: 70, translation slightly modified) Roughly, the philosophical thought behind Hegel’s concluding syllogism and Schelling’s idea of a split of the nonground is the following: the domains of nature and of spirit turn out to be intelligible. Their intelligibility cannot be guaranteed a priori, simply in virtue of a logical movement that isolates itself from facticity. This is why neither Schelling nor Hegel follow Kant in assuming that there are categories, i.e., pure concepts of the understanding, and pure intuitions.11 For this reason, there has to be a process of validation in terms of an operation of thinking in impure material, a process I have designated as ‘impure thinking’. On the basis of this process, we come to know that the principle of intelligibility is not overthrown by empirical reality. Empirical reality does not present a metaphysical obstacle to its knowability. Yet this process of validation should also not be construed in terms of a subject-object or mindworld-distinction. Given that any world that is intelligible to a thinker includes that very thinker, it is nonsensical to think of the world/the absolute as an object of investigation.12 In this picture, the absolute is what holds mind and world together in such a way that it is identical with neither of them. For Hegel, the highest point of the system is reached once we come to realize this structure. To be sure, Hegel would probably argue that Schelling’s account of the split of the absolute is incomplete due to the absence of a fully developed logic. Schelling himself answered this worry with his mature distinction between a negative, purely rational philosophy and a positive philosophy, which introduces the notion of a logical facticity in order to overcome the split between the idea and nature which Schelling thinks he discerns in Hegel, albeit without realizing that the concluding chapters of the Encyclopedia contain a brutally telegraphic response to this problem.13 86

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Be that as it may, it would lead too far afield to spell out the parallels and differences in Hegel’s and Schelling’s respective strategies for completing their system. Yet it is important to bear in mind that this is the context of Hegel’s metaphysics, which goes far beyond the eclectic synthesis of Kant and Aristotle that Pippin and other contemporary commentators assume without even mentioning the development of Post-Kantian ontology and metaphysics in the wake of late Fichte and Schelling.14 Impure (empirically grounded) thinking is not only possible, but has to be actual if we want to avoid the typical Kantian dualisms that Hegel abhors throughout his entire career. The right way to overcome the form-content-problem of transcendental idealism is to think of reality as conceptually articulated. Concepts are not ‘in the head’ or ‘in the mind’, but rather as much ‘out there’ as ‘in here’. The domain of the conceptual thus spans the apparent gulf between mind and world so that we are able to see the principle of intelligibility operative in all domains of what there is. The vindication or validation of Hegelian absolute idealism lies in surpassing the (ultimately Fichtean) idea that idealism is primarily a point about self-consciousness. The absolute idea informs absolutely everything there is by being manifest in nature and spirit. Nature and spirit in turn are essentially related to a series of forms of thinking whose articulation is developed in the Realphilosophie. Recognizing that Hegel is a systematic thinker whose main work is the complete system presented in the Encyclopedia requires a whole-hearted rejection of the metaphysical priority of the Logic. The Logic’s priority is restricted to one of the syllogisms of philosophy, i.e., its linear order. The second syllogism demonstrates the indispensability of impure thinking and the third provides us with a highly compressed account of the closure of the system in terms of an insight into the fact that thinking is not limited to pure, logical thinking.

Notes 1 The crucial passage here is Hegel (2010b: 37): ‘The system of logic is the realm of shadows, the world of simple essentialities, freed of all sensuous concretion. To study this science, to dwell and labour in this realm of shadows, is the absolute culture and discipline of consciousness’. Hegel does on to characterize various advantages for human thought derived from engaging in the study of logical ‘essentialities’ which clearly indicates that he takes actual thought processes performed by finite thinkers into account. As will become clear, I wholeheartedly disagree with Pippin’s reading of the metaphor of ‘the realm of shadows’ according to which ‘the topic of pure thinking has nothing to do with the thinker, the subject, consciousness, the mind’ (2018: 7). Some of Pippin’s incoherent formulations indicate that something is wrong with this account. See, for instance, the blatantly contradictory statement in Pippin (2018: 15): ‘to put Hegel’s idealism in summary form: Logic is the science of pure thinking. Pure thinking’s object is, and only is, itself. But this ‘object’ is not a nature, an object’. Remarkably, Pippin misses a crucial intertextual reference to Kant’s Dreams of A Spirit Seer where Kant literally compares metaphysics to a ‘realm of shadows’ (Reich der Schatten) (see Kant 1992: 2:329): ‘The initiate has already accustomed the untutored understanding, which clings to the outer senses, to higher concepts of an abstract character. He is now able to see spirit-forms, stripped of their corporeal shell, in the half-light with which the dim torch of metaphysics reveals the realm of shades [Reich der Schatten]’. 2 See also Hegel (2010a: sec. 246, 33), remark, translation slightly modified: ‘The relation of philosophy to the empirical sciences was discussed in the general introduction. Not only must philosophy be in agreement with our empirical knowledge of Nature, but the origin and formation of the Philosophy of Nature presupposes and is conditioned by empirical physics. However, the course of a science’s origin and the preliminaries of its construction are one thing, while the science itself is another. In the latter, the former can no longer appear as the foundation of the science; here, the foundation must be the necessity of the Concept’. 3 For important qualifications of this parallel, see Gabriel (2017). 4 Pace Pippin, Hegel does not regard judgment as the primary unit of sense-making—see Lau (2004).

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Markus Gabriel 5 See Hegel (2007: sec. 467, 204), addition: ‘The second moment of pure thinking is judging. Intelligence which, as intellect, tears apart from one another the various abstract determinations immediately united in the concrete individuality of the object and detaches them from the object, necessarily proceeds, first of all, to relate the object to these universal thought-determinations, and so to consider the object as relationship, as an objective interconnection, as a totality. Often this activity of intelligence is even called comprehension, but wrongly so. For at this standpoint the object is still conceived as a given, as dependent on an Other and conditioned by it’. 6 See also the famous passage in Hegel (2010b: 29): ‘Accordingly, logic is to be understood as the system of pure reason, as the realm of pure thought. This realm is truth unveiled, truth as it is in and for itself. It can therefore be said that this content is the exposition of God as he is in his eternal essence before the creation of nature and of a finite spirit’. 7 Without providing any textual evidence Pippin suspects my account of impure thinking to be ‘‘Schellingian’ (2020: 440). Yet, this overall schematic reconstruction of the architecture of Hegel’s system precisely potentially protects it from Schelling’s worry that the entire system is an exercise in negative philosophy, thought purely directed at itself, yet masquerading as in touch with reality. If I had to translate my point in (Gabriel 2020a) into the dialectics of the Schelling-Hegel-split, I would say that Pippin’s Hegel is precisely Schelling’s Hegel and, therefore, succumbs to the existential pressure Schelling rightly identifies in negative philosophy. Nature and spirit are not extra-logical, ‘other than thinking’ (Pippin 2020: 443), as thinking takes place in nature, embodied in finite thinkers. Pippin treats the Hegelian system as a logically contingent existential ‘resolve’ (2020: 443) rather than as a system of philosophical sciences necessary for the realisation of logical form. The concepts of the Realphilosophie are real extensions of logical form, of the idea, and not a ‘manifestation of the Concept in what is other than thinking’ (2020: 443). 8 Remarkably, Pippin does not even mention the concluding paragraphs of the Encyclopedia in his various statements about Hegel’s account of philosophy in Pippin (2018, 2020). For an overview of the sparse literature on the three syllogisms, see Füzesi (2004), from which my reconstruction departs in various details. It would take me too far afield here to spell this out, as it would require a full reconstruction of the relationship between the account of syllogisms in the Logic and their validation conditions in art, religion, and philosophy. The argument in the main text only relies on the claim that the doctrine of the three syllogisms of philosophy is evidence against Pippin’s priority-of-theLogic-view. 9 Hegel (2007: sec. 575, 276): ‘the mediation of the concept has the external form of transition, and science has the form of the progression of necessity, so that only in the one extreme is the freedom of the concept posited as its joining together with itself ’. From the very few remarks on the structure of the system I could locate in Pippin, I infer that his account at best captures the form of the first syllogism, which is one of its shortcomings. 10 For the ontology of the Freedom Essay, see Gabriel (2014) and my earlier Gabriel (2006a). 11 Strictly speaking, categories in Hegel are restricted to the objective logic. The subjective logic deals with ‘thought determinations’, not with categories, which is a crucial distinction drawn by Hegel, but overlooked by many commentators who mistakenly assimilate the Science of Logic to an exercise in Kantian transcendental logic. See Gabriel (2020d). 12 See the outstanding dissertation on Hegel’s concept of metaphysics by Parra Ayala (2019). 13 For a reading of the mature distinction between negative and positive philosophy in late Schelling, see Gabriel (2006b). 14 Pippin is entirely wrong when he distances Hegel from Neo-Platonism. As a matter of fact, the early Schelling and Hegel engaged in intensive readings and discussions of Neo-Platonic philosophy, and Hegel followed Schelling in explicitly draw on the entire Platonic tradition. After all, the master term of the Hegelian system turns out to be the idea (not the concept!) which, if anything, is an obvious tribute to the Platonic tradition. For a full-fledged reconstruction of this relationship with impressive exegetical, historical, textual and philosophical evidence, see the opus magnum of Jens Halfwassen (2005).

References Beierwaltes, W. (2004) Platonismus und Idealismus, 2nd ed., Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann. Brandom, R. B. (2019) A Spirit of Trust. A Reading of Hegel’s ‘Phenomenology’, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.

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Pure and impure thinking Dangel, T. (2013) Hegel und die Geistmetaphysik des Aristoteles, Berlin: De Gruyter. Düsing, K. (1983) Hegel und die Geschichte der Philosophie. Ontologie und Dialektik in Antike und Neuzeit, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Fichte, J. G. (2005), The Science of Knowing. J. G. Fichte’s 1804 Lectures on the ‘Wissenschaftslehre’, (trans.) W. E. Wright, Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Frege, G. (1997) On Concept and Object, in M. Beaney (ed.), The Frege Reader, Oxford: Blackwell, 181–193. Fulda, H. F. (1975) Das Problem einer Einleitung in Hegels Wissenschaft der Logik, Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann. Füzesi, N. (2004) Hegels drei Schlüsse, Freiburg/München: Alber. Gabriel, M. (2006a) Das Absolute und die Welt in Schellings Freiheitsschrift, Bonn: Bonn University Press. Gabriel, M. (2006b) Der Mensch im Mythos. Untersuchungen über Ontotheologie, Anthropologie und Selbstbewußtseinsgeschichte in Schellings ‘Philosophie der Mythologie’, Berlin: De Gruyter. Gabriel, M. (2011) Transcendental Ontology. Essays in German Idealism, London: Continuum. Gabriel, M. (2013) Aarhus Lectures. Schelling and Contemporary Philosophy—First Lecture: Schelling on Why There Is Something rather than Nothing in the Original Version (Urfassung) of the Philosophy of Revelation, SATS: Northern European Journal of Philosophy 14.1: 70–101. Gabriel, M. (2014) Aarhus Lectures. Schelling and Contemporary Philosophy—Second Lecture: Schelling’s Ontology in the Freedom Essay, SATS: Northern European Journal of Philosophy 15.1: 75–98. Gabriel, M. (2015a) Aarhus Lectures. Schelling and Contemporary Philosophy—Third Lecture: The Prospects of Schelling’s Critique of Hegel, SATS: Northern European Journal of Philosophy, 16.1: 114–137. Gabriel, M. (2015b) Hegels Begriff der Vorstellung und das Form-Inhalt-Problem, in K. Drilo and A. Hutter (eds.), Spekulation und Vorstellung in Hegels enzyklopädischem System, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Gabriel, M. (2015c) Fields of Sense. A New Realist Ontology, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Gabriel, M. (2016) What Kind of an Idealist (if any) Is Hegel? Hegel-Bulletin 27.2: 181–208. Gabriel, M. (2017) I Am Not a Brain. Philosophy of Mind for the 21st Century, Cambridge: Polity Press. Gabriel, M. (2019a) Hegel’s Account of Perceptual Experience in His Philosophy of Subjective Spirit, in M. F. Bykova (ed.), Hegel’s Philosophy of Spirit. A Critical Guide, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 104–124. Gabriel, M. (2019b) The Limits of Epistemology, Cambridge: Polity Press. Gabriel, M. (2020a) Transcendental Ontology and Apperceptive Idealism, Australasian Philosophical Review, 2.4: 383–392. Gabriel, M. (2020b) Intuition, Representation, and Thinking. Hegel’s Psychology and the Placement Problem, in M. F. Bykova and K. R. Westphal (eds.), The Palgrave Hegel Handbook, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan (forthcoming). Gabriel, M. (2020c) Fiktionen, Berlin: Suhrkamp. Gabriel, M. (2020d) Hegels Kategorienkritik, in R. Schäfer (ed.), Kategoriendeduktion im Deutschen Idealismus, Berlin: Duncker and Humblot (forthcoming). Halfwassen, J. (2005) Hegel und der spätantike Neuplatonismus. Untersuchungen zur Metaphysik des Einen und des Nous in Hegels spekulativer und geschichtlicher Deutung, 2nd ed., Hamburg: Meiner. Hegel, G. W. F. (1991) Elements of the Philosophy of Right, (ed.) A. W. Wood, (trans.) H. B. Nisbet, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hegel, G. W. F. (2007) Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind [Enc. Secs. 377–577], (trans.) W. Wallace and A. V. Miller, revised by M. J. Inwood, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hegel, G. W. F. (2010a) Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline. Part I: Science of Logic [Enc. Secs. 1–236], (ed. and trans.) K. Brinkmann and D. O. Dahlstrom, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hegel, G. W. F. (2010b) The Science of Logic, (ed. and trans.) G. Di Giovanni, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hegel, G. W. F. (2018) The Phenomenology of Spirit, (ed. and trans.) T. Pinkard, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heidemann, D. H. & Krijnen, C. (eds.) (2007) Hegel und die Geschichte der Philosophie, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Hoffmann, T. S. (2003) Philosophische Physiologie. Eine Systematik des Begriffs der Natur im Spiegel der Geschichte der Philosophie, Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog.

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Markus Gabriel Kant, I. (1992) Dreams of a Spirit Seer, in Theoretical Philosophy, 1755–1770, D. Walford and R. Meerbote (trans.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 301–361. Koch, A. F. (2014) Die Evolution des logischen Raums. Aufsätze zu Hegels Nichtstandard-Metaphysik, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Lau, C.-F. (2004) Hegels Urteilskritik: Systematische Untersuchungen zum Grundproblem der spekulativen Logik, München: Wilhelm Fink. Parra Ayala, A. F. (2019) Das spekulative Geschehen: Über die Bedeutung der Metaphysik in Hegels Wissenschaft der Logik, Bonn Dissertation. Pippin, R. B. (2018) Hegel’s Realm of Shadows. Logic as Metaphysics in ‘The Science of Logic’, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pippin, R. B. (2020) On Idealism. Responses to Markus Gabriel, James Kreines, Christopher Yeomans, Purushottama Bilimoria, Gene Flenady, Lorenzo Sala, and Jonathan Shaheen, Australasian Philosophical Review, 2.4: 440–457. Rometsch, J. (2007) Hegels Theorie des erkennenden Subjekts. Systematische Untersuchungen zur enzyklopädischen Philosophie des subjektiven Geistes, Würzburg: Königshausen and Neumann. Schäfer, R. (2001) Die Dialektik und ihre besonderen Formen in Hegels Logik. Entwicklungsgeschichtliche und systematische Untersuchungen, Hamburg: Meiner. Schelling, F. W. J. (2006) Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, (trans.) J. Love and J. Schmidt, Albany, NY: SUNY Press.

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7 DENKICHT—THICKETTHINKING WITH WALTER BENJAMIN AROUND 1917 Peter Fenves

In the ‘Epistemo-Critical Preface’ to his Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (Origin of the German Mourning Play) Walter Benjamin distinguishes between philosophical and scientific-scholarly modes of argumentation insofar as the latter readily accepts new terminologies, whereas the former does not: ‘The introduction of new terminologies, as long as they are not intended solely for the domain of concepts, is … worrisome [bedenklich] within the philosophical domain. Such terminologies—a misfortunate naming, in which intention [Meinen] assumes a greater share than language—betrays the objectivity that history has given the principal coinages of philosophical reflection’ (GS 1, 217).1 With perhaps only a single exception—identified in the title of this essay—Benjamin adheres to this maxim: new words are to be avoided in philosophical reflection. As Samuel Weber has shown, Benjamin often works with words ending with the suffix -barkeit (‘ability’); yet none of these words is new, nor do they violate any rules of word construction (see Weber 2008). In ‘Zwei Gedichte von Friedrich Hölderlin’ (‘Two Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin’) Benjamin comes close to introducing a new terminology insofar as he constructs a technical term for aesthetic inquiry, namely ‘the poetized’ (das Gedichtete); but this word is not a neologism, for it can be found in earlier writers, including Goethe, and it functions as something like a place-holder, since, as he argues, when the ‘pure poetized’ is realized, ‘the poetized’ disappears and is replaced by either ‘life or poem’ (GS 2, 108).2 When Benjamin recounts his dreams, he comes still closer to violating his proscription on philosophical neologisms. An illuminating instance can be found in a section of Einbahnstrasse (One-Way Street), whose very title, ‘Underground Construction Works’, refers to the process in question: ‘In a dream’, Benjamin writes, ‘I saw a barren land. It was the marketplace of Weimar. There, excavations were organized. I, too, scrapped a little in the sand. Then, the tip of a church steeple came up. Highly delighted, I thought to myself: a Mexican shrine from the time of pre-animism, from Anaquivitzli. I awoke with laughter. (Ana = ανα; vi = vie; witz = Mexican church [!])’ (GS 4, 101). The dream evidently draws on psychic material Benjamin acquired while studying pre-conquest Mesoamerican history and mythology with Walter Lehmann at the Ludwig-Maximilian University of Munich, beginning in the fall of 1915. Later in Berlin, as reported by Gershom Scholem (1975: 47), he expanded his knowledge of Nahuatl by pouring over Alonso de Molina’s Vocabulario en Lengua Castellana y Mexicana—with the result that, while dreaming, he introduces a Nahuatl-sounding term to designate ‘the time of pre-animism’, for which there is perhaps no word in the European languages he knew. 91

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Nevertheless, the Nahuatl-like term he constructs does not violate the proscription against new philosophical terminologies for at least two reasons: he did not intend to produce it, and he has no idea what Anaquivitzli—outside of its European context—actually means. Far from being ‘worrisome’, Anaquivitzli, broken into its phonic elements through a brief tour of Western European languages, elicits laughter instead. Despite all of this, Benjamin does construct one new philosophical term. It occurs in a letter he sends to Scholem in December 1917. As far as I have been able to determine, this is the sole unambiguous violation of his own proscription against introducing neologisms into philosophy. That the word in question is philosophical rather than scientific-scholarly is undeniable, for it does not concern any object that could be known but, rather, the nature of truth itself. And if any new word can be said to be bedenklich (‘worrisome’), it would be denkicht, which splits the difference, so to speak, between a carefully constructed technical term like Gedichtete and a spontaneously produced dream word like Anaquivitzli: ‘Truth is “thinkicket-like” [Die Wahrheit ist “denkicht”] (I must form this word because none is at my disposal)’ (GB 1, 409), as Benjamin writes to Scholem. Denkicht merges Denken (‘to think’) with Dickicht (‘thicket’) to produce a word that obviously defies any simple translation; but insofar as translation is required, the best option is probably thinkicket-like. After describing the insight that led Benjamin, almost against his will, to merge think with thicket into a single word, the essay concludes with a brief coda in which it indicates how this insight lies at the basis of his doctoral dissertation. ∗ Benjamin is led to say of truth that it is ‘thinkicket-like’ in pursuit of the problem of identity. Sometime in late 1916 or early 1917, he drew up a document under the title ‘Theses über das Problem der Identität’ (‘Theses on the Problem of Identity’) that consists of eleven numbered theses, the last of which is much longer than the previous ten and includes a remark that moves toward a topic Benjamin had hitherto avoided: ‘How identity with itself—for the principle of identity [Satz von Identität] attests to its possibility, and it is the principle’s actual content—is distinguished from another kind of identity, and whether this other kind is a purely formallogical identity of [the] thought as such [des Gedachten als solchen] in contrast with that of the object [des Gegenstandes] with itself—this [question] must be set aside. According to the proposition “a is a,” only a is identical with itself, and only the a of this proposition, not the concrete object (see [thesis] 5)’ (GS 6, 29; see also Tagliacozzo 2014). Much as Benjamin may have initially wanted to limit his own confrontation with the problem of the identity to the form and content of tautologies such as ‘a is a’, the eleventh thesis draws him into a discussion of ‘thinking’ as the ‘region’ in which such a proposition is ‘something self-evident [eine Selbstverständlichkeit]’ (GS 6, 28). With the theme of thinking, however, comes the problem of its putative object-pole, that is, ‘(the) thought’ (das Gedachte), and with this problem, there arises the corresponding question of the relation between ‘(the) thought’ and what is thought—in other words, ‘the object’ (das Gegenstand), which would presumably transcend the ‘region of thinking’. There is little wonder that Benjamin wants to put off these questions, for they immediately require an inquiry into the nature of truth—specifically, how any given thought, as the immanent object-pole of thinking, can accord with, or be adequate to, its object, if it has one. The impetus for Benjamin’s ‘Theses on the Problem of Identity’, by contrast, lies in putting off such questions in accordance with a general philosophical itinerary that he formulates in numerous documents of this period—most directly in a contemporaneous essay ‘On the Program of the Coming Philosophy’. The basic schema of this essay has no place for 92

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thought and object; rather, the ‘coming philosophy’, according to Benjamin, originates in a neutral sphere of pure knowledge—beyond subject and object—from which ‘a new concept of experience’ (GS 2, 163) emerges or derives. The construction of a concept of identity that accords with this schema is thus a desideratum of the highest programmatic order: Looking ahead, the fixing of the concept of identity, a concept with which Kant was himself unfamiliar, has to play a large role in the transcendental logic, insofar as it does not occur in the table of categories, yet nevertheless presumably constitutes the highest transcendental-logical concept and is perhaps truly suited to grounding autonomously the sphere of knowledge beyond subject-object terminology. (GS 2, 167) Kant is obviously not ‘unfamiliar’ with the concept of identity; but the point of Benjamin’s remark is that the concept of identity in the Critique of Pure Reason is fundamental only insofar as it grounds the transcendental unity of apperception; it is thereby subordinated to the subjectivism of transcendental self-consciousness. Fichte’s attempts at working out a Wissenschaftslehre on the basis of subject-oriented interpretation of the identity formula ‘a = a’ only exacerbates this subjectivism, and Benjamin likewise casts doubt on the ability of a dialectical revision of the Kantian categorial system to identify a ‘sphere of total neutrality with respect to the concepts of subject and object’ (GS 2, 163). It is in this context that Benjamin sought guidance from ‘logistics’, since the aim of the logistical program inaugurated by Russell and Frege seems to consist in an effective neutralization of subjectivism and a corresponding transformation of the idea of the object. Benjamin’s brief engagement with logistics, however, convinced him that it nevertheless contains a certain subjectivism, which expresses itself in its tendency to introduce new philosophical terminologies. Thus, for instance, Russell constructs the term impredicative for the purpose of producing an abbreviated version of the paradox named after him—to which Benjamin responds as follows: ‘Inauthentic meaning [uneigentliche Bedeutung], that is, designation, is to be distinguished from authentic meaning. “S is P” does not designate but rather means [bedeutet] that S is P. Impredicative designates the predicate of a certain judgment, unapproachable means something’ (GS 6, 10). A mode of meaning unapproachable by means of designation can be identified only under the condition that language ‘objectively’ speaks in place of speaking subjects who see themselves as capable of imposing their ‘meanings’ onto the language they ‘use’. Shortly after Benjamin distinguishes between ‘authentic’ and ‘inauthentic meaning’ in his discussion of Russell’s paradox, he directly poses the question that guides his inquiry into the problem of identity: ‘what does identity mean [was bedeutet Identität]’ (GS 6, 10)—which is to say, what does the word mean, rather than what can it be made to designate for certain ‘philosophical’ purposes? Around the same time as Benjamin asked about the meaning of identity in the context of his engagement with logistics, Wittgenstein made the following note to himself: ‘Identity is still, as I already said, not at all clear’ (1979: 129).3 As with Wittgenstein, Benjamin undertakes an investigation into the problem through a concentrated reflection on the structure and meaning of each element in the traditional tautological formula ‘a is a’. Unlike Wittgenstein’s Notebooks, which provide the basis for his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Benjamin’s ‘Theses on the Problem of Identity’ produces no definitive results. On the contrary, as indicated earlier, Benjamin’s ‘Theses’ issue into a final thesis that seems to become progressively less ‘thetic’, that is, less sure of what it wishes to develop on the basis of its inquiry into the proposition ‘a is a’. Above all, Benjamin stumbles into thorny problems of the relation between thinking, ‘(the) thought’, and object. As is typical for Benjamin in this period, Kant serves as his initial guide—in this case, 93

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offering the outlines of a distinction between the ‘formal-logical identity’ of the thought and the ‘metaphysical identity’ of the object. Thus arises the question with which the eleventh thesis concludes: how are these two forms of identity related to each other under the presumption that they are not themselves identical to each other but are not altogether different either? In an unnumbered parenthesis with which the ‘Theses on the Problem of Identity’ abruptly ends, Benjamin begins to correct the line of argument that thesis eleven had only begun to develop: In the previous thesis [eleven], the designation of the objective ur-identity “a is a” as identity with itself is false. “A is a” says only that there is such a thing as objective identity, whereas “identity with itself” is already a (singular or only one among others) founded objective identity, whereas “identity with itself” is already an objective identity (the only one or only one among others). (GS 6, 29) Any careful review of Benjamin’s argument would reveal that final parenthesis is strikingly different from the previous thesis precisely because it makes ‘a is a’ into a formulation of ‘objective identity’ without any corresponding consideration of its ‘subjective’ counterpart within ‘the region of thinking’. What the self-correction appears to be saying by way of silence is this: just as ‘there is such a thing as objective identity’, so there is no such thing as the self-identity of ‘(the) thought’. In suggesting this, however, Benjamin is castings doubt on the very notion of ‘thought’—whether there is such a thing as an objective (immanent) counterpart to the activity of thinking. In sending his ‘Theses on the Problem of Identity’ to Scholem, Benjamin expected to find a reader who could review his argument and help him advance it toward its implicit consequences. And Scholem should have been an ideal conversation partner, for during the winter of 1917–18, as a student at the University of Jena, he was attending a seminar on the philosophy of logic given by Frege and also found himself in close contact with Paul Linke, whose 1916 manifesto ‘Das Recht der Phänomenologie’ (‘The Law of Phenomenology’) prompted Benjamin to draw up a detailed response under the title ‘Eidos und Begriff’ (‘Eidos and Concept’, GS 6, 29–31). With both Benjamin’s ‘Theses’ and ‘Eidos and Concept’ in his possession, Scholem was perfectly placed to receive the following remarks, where Benjamin dares to introduce a new philosophical term: In the matter of the identity problem we can decisively move forward only in conversation, and for this reason I do not unconditionally ascribe certainty to the following propositions. For a very long time the matter of identity has seemed to me as follows: I would deny an identity of thinking as of something particular, neither as an object or nor as a thought, because I dispute the notion that a ‘thinking’ is the correlate of truth. Truth is ‘thinkicket-like’. (I must form this word because none is at my disposal). ‘Thinking’ as an absolute is perhaps only somehow an abstraction from truth. (GB 1, 409) Instead of immediately helping Scholem understand what he seeks to capture with the introduction of denkicht, Benjamin proceeds to sketch the consequence of the two principles that generate the philosophical neologism. The first principle is, so Benjamin suggests, axiomatic for all of his thought: thinking is not a correlate of truth. In other words, the activity of thinking may proceed in various directions; but it cannot arrive at the destination called ‘truth’. The second principle, marked by a 94

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‘perhaps’, is not so much an axiom as a scholium: absolute thinking—which would presumably be thinking about nothing other than thinking itself—is an abstraction from truth. This suggests that absolute thinking ‘draws away’ from truth and may also produce a ‘draft’ or ‘abstract’ of truth in its departure. The initial function of thinkicket-like is to indicate that thinking is related to truth—but not as its ‘correlate’. And the ‘thicket’ element of thinkicket-like suggests a reason that thinking would want to be absolved from truth—so as to clear a path for itself, abstracted from truth, which would open up the prospect of non-truth-filled paths. Such would presumably be ‘absolute thinking’: abstracted from the ‘thicket’, it makes the absence of all thicket-like characteristics—‘clarity’, ‘distinctness’, ‘transparency’—into its criteria of truth qua correctness, rectilinearity, rectitude, and so forth. Even while Benjamin emphasizes that his thoughts would advance more effectively through the give-and-take of conversation than through the obduracy of epistolary correspondence, he nevertheless proceeds a little further and suggests how the illusion of a thinker who is somehow abstracted not only from truth but also from the activity of thinking emerges: ‘The assertion of the identity of thinking would be the absolute tautology. The illusion of a “thinking” [Der Schein eines “Denkens”] emerges only from tautologies. Truth is just as little thought as it thinks’ (GB 1, 409).4 Benjamin’s argument seems to proceed along the following lines: (1) thinking is so thoroughly identical with itself that the expression of this thought would require a tautology that would be absolved of any relation to other tautologies, including, for instance, ‘a is a’, which is, of course, different from ‘b is b’, and so forth. (2) A ‘thinking’, which would be distinguished from ‘another’ thinking and could thereafter be identified with ‘a thinker’ who is likewise distinguished from other thinkers is an illusion—not because there is no such thing as thinking in general but because thinking cannot determined, delimited, and defined, least of all through the illusion of particular ‘thoughts’. (3) Tautologies in the plural give rise to the illusion that there is such a thing as ‘a thinker’ because each of them includes a mark (such as a) that could be designated as the sign of an object, a thought, or even a thinker. And finally, (4) truth cannot be identified with either the subject- or the object-pole of thinking—which, however, does not imply that truth is ‘unthinkable’, since this thought would still be ‘a thought’ distinguishable from other thoughts. In short, truth does not think as a thinker would be said to think; yet it is not altogether distinguished from thinking; rather, its thinking is thwarted—which, however, never amounts to ‘a thought’ in its own right. Truth, in sum, is thinking-like without any thoughts, hence ‘think-thicket-like’, and thinking is always already blocked before it can reach the destination of ‘a’ thought, which would mark a certain place in its region. At this crucial point in his second thoughts on the problem of identity Benjamin must have re-read his own letter, added a new paragraph marker and then, strangely enough, also added a footnote: ‘/ “a is a” designates in my estimation the identity of the thought∗’—where the asterisk refers to a footnote at the bottom of the page: ‘∗better said (the only correct formulation): [the identity of] the truth itself [der Wahrheit selbst]’ (GB 1, 409). The revised argument run as follows: (1) absolute tautology cannot be formulated because any formulation would involve a relative term—a, for instance, which is clearly related to an entire field of graphic markers. (2) By contrast, a particular tautology can be formulated; yet it does not mean anything; rather, it only designates ‘the identity of (the) thought’, which, for its part, is always the same, regardless of the object to which it can be supposed to refer. On third thought, however, (3) any given tautology does not designate the identity of (the) thought but, rather, the identity of truth itself, because—this is crucial—there is no such thing as ‘thought’ understood as ‘the thought’ (das Gedachte), which would be the immanent object-pole of the activity of thinking. To express this in semi-German and semi-English: das Gedachte does not exist, and die Wahrheit selbst is the only ‘thing’ that any tautology, regardless of its distinguishable markers, can be said correctly to designate. The force of the latter self-correction can be captured by a query of the 95

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following kind. If one were to ask what ‘a is a’ means rather than what it designates, the only answer would be ‘nothing’, insofar as ‘meaning’ or ‘reference’ (Bedeutung) always involves an object, even if it is a confabulated object like Frege’s ‘truth’,—which is what all true propositions are said to ‘mean’ (bedeuten), just as all false propositions are said to ‘mean’ falsehood (Frege 1986: 40–65). ‘Truth itself’, by contrast, can be designated only by a formal stipulation that precludes impredicativity, insofar as it is a mere stipulation; that is, it is not itself asserted as true, only as ‘correct’, which is neutral with respect to truth. Benjamin’s argument thus resolves on a terminological distinction between correctness and truth, which he emphasizes at the bottom of his letter: ‘the only correct formulation’ is not a true formula; but it is not false either. As for the field of possible referents, here called ‘objects’, forms of identity can doubtless be attributed to them; but these forms are not that of truth. The letter thus continues: ‘The identity of the object, assuming there is such a thing in a perfect manner, would have another form (forms of imperfect identities that in perfection turn into a [single] form of the form “a is a”)’ (GB 1, 409). What Benjamin thus envisages accords with the aforementioned passage in his programmatic essay: ‘a doctrine of orders’ that would replace Kant’s transcendental logic with a logistics that somehow transcends all subject-object terminology, without introducing new ones. As Benjamin indicates at the end of the relevant paragraph of his December 1917 letter, phenomenology, with its ‘doctrine of the eidos’ (GB 1, 409), is ‘probably’ helpful in this regard, for a theory of ideas, which are neither objective nor subjective—and can claim an eminent philosophical heritage—may lead to the requisite alternative. All of Scholem’s relevant letters to Benjamin are lost; but his side of their epistolary conversation can be partially reconstructed through the notes included in his diary of the period, especially those diary entries in which he records his negative reaction to both ‘Eidos and Concept’ and ‘Theses on the Problem of Identity’. In Scholem’s view—bolstered by Linke, who apparently dismissed ‘Eidos and Concept’ as misguided from beginning to end—Benjamin is a lousy phenomenologist. To corroborate this verdict, Scholem sketches what he calls the ‘phenomenological doctrine of orders’, apparently with the aim of refuting Benjamin’s ‘Theses’ root and branch. At the end of his sketch Scholem raises an objection to the last of the ‘Theses’, where, as discussed earlier, Benjamin distinguishes between the identity of (the) thought and that of the object and casts doubt on whether the variable in the formula ‘a is a’ can stand for an object: ‘If’, Scholem notes to himself, ‘I say that the thought [das Gedachte] is identical with itself (Walter), the thought is nevertheless here an object in our sense’—where ‘our’ does not mean his and Walter’s but presumably only his, or perhaps his and Linke’s (see Scholem 1995–2000: 2, 79). Scholem’s objection is in any case purely formal, a matter of stipulating what the term object is supposed to mean, such that it applies to any subject-term in a standard subject-predicate assertion. Under this condition, Benjamin obviously makes a mistake. There can be no ‘thought’, without something, viz. an object, that is therein thought. This obviously accords with the ‘law’ of phenomenology, to use Linke’s expression. Upon receiving Benjamin’s ‘Theses’, Scholem must have written to its author in terms such as these, instructing him in the elements of phenomenology and asking him whether he had ever come across Husserl’s work, where the cogito-cogitatum structure is discussed at length. And this presumably generates the passage in the December 1917 letter with which Benjamin formally concludes his attempt to expand the ‘Theses’ with Scholem’s assistance: ‘Apropos [the doctrine of eidos]: Linke’s reputation in the rigorous phenomenological school is, to my knowledge, not very high; of course, this doesn’t prove very much. I read Husserl’s Logos essay [‘Philosophy as a Rigorous Science’] several years ago’ (GB 1, 410)—at which point, he again describes the circumstances in which he wrote ‘Eidos and Concept’ and turns to other matters altogether.5 In responding to Scholem’s epistolary objection, Benjamin wants to indicate nothing so much as this: ‘das Gedachte’, as he conceives it, must not to be confused with noema, understood 96

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as a thought-object, which remains identical to itself regardless of any modulations in intentional attitude, such as wishing, hoping, remembering, and so forth. Scholem may have inadvertently helped him advance his line of thought, after all, for the recognition that ‘das Gedachte’ is not the same as noema immediately leads to the following insight: there is no such thing as ‘a thought’ and therefore no ‘thought’ at all, only the activity of thinking. In a fragment Benjamin probably wrote around the same time, this paradoxical thought-of-no-thought begins to take shape, as he proposes a grammatical counterpart to the lexical innovation in his December 1917 letter. In characterizing truth as denkicht, he is self-consciously introducing something new into the German language; in the following fragment, quoted in full, he is formulating a grammatical remark that rescues German (as well as many other languages, including English) from philosophers who want to use it to say something else. The fragment begins where the relevant paragraph in the December 1917 letter leaves off: Concepts do not lend themselves as such to thinking; rather, only judgments do. That is, judgments are think-constructions [Denkgebilde]. Can, however, the human being as an empirical being think at all? Is thinking in general an activity in the same sense as hammering or sowing? Or is it not an activity directed at something [keine Tätigkeit auf etwas hin] but, rather, a transcendent intransitive [transcendentes Intransitivum], just as walking is an empirical intransitive?’ (GB 6, 43) Within the broader sphere of Kantian thought, to which the fragment refers, the counterpart to empirical is not transcendent but, rather, transcendental. Benjamin opts for the former term, however, because he probably wants to avoid technical-philosophical terms and emphasize, instead, the root of both words, which can be translated as ‘leaping over’ or, better yet, ‘climbing beyond’. As for the word Denken, it—like its English equivalent—does not generally accept a direct object. To be sure, one can form idiomatic German and English sentences in which someone is said to think great (or wonderful or terrible, etc.) thoughts, but in both languages, any specification of such thoughts requires a preposition that separates the activity of thinking from the (object of) thought. As in some of his reflections on the grammar of sensation—for instance, the double sense of smelling and tasting—Benjamin listens to what language has to say (see GS 7, 22). In the case of smelling and tasting, it says that subject and object are indistinct from each other. In the case of thinking, it says: thinking can take a direct object only if the thoughts are not themselves distinguished from one another. Hence, one can think certain thoughts but not an object (of thought). As soon as there is some-one-thing to think, it must be thought ‘of’ (in German, ‘an’) or ‘about’ (‘über’). In other words, the activity of thinking is primarily intransitive; only in the case of indefinite things does the verb achieve semi-transitivity. Philosophers, however, refuse to listen to what language says—and this is especially true of phenomenologists who, perhaps for this reason, return to scholastic Latin in an effort to circumscribe the structure of intentionality through the supposed correlation of cogito and cogitatum. The first question Benjamin raises in the aforementioned fragment casts doubt on the objective validity of the final -o in cogito. In this regard, he follows a notable line of inquiry initiated by Lichtenberg and avidly explored by Nietzsche, both of whom say that ‘it thinks’ (see Lichtenberg 2012: 192–93; Nietzsche 1988: 11, 639–41). The last of his questions, however, is more innovative and far-reaching, for it suggests that cogitare—insofar as it is understood as ‘thinking’—never meets up with a cogitatum at all. If the mini-program of the coming philosophy that emerges from the first and last questions of the fragment could be 97

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forged into a single proposal, it would run as follows: thinking as such, das Denken überhaupt, climbs beyond every pole, including those that are thrown down (called ‘sub-jects’) and those that are thrown against (called ‘ob-jects’). This image corresponds in reverse to the neologism, which melds the activity of thinking with a space so filled with obstacles that every step is blocked before it can be completed. Despite its interrogatory mode, the fragment precisely describes the activity of thinking, once its Latinate terms are translated into non-Latinate equivalents: when thinking fails to move on (‘intransitive’), it climbs beyond (‘transcendent’). Conjoining the December 1917 letter with the fragment yields an image of how thinking moves free from any single thought: as it gets bogged down, it rises up—and vice versa. In the early 1920s Benjamin makes a second attempt to characterize the nature of truth in a pithy manner, writing the following as the first of five ‘Arten des Wissens’ (‘Modes of Knowing’): ‘truth is the death of the intentio’ (GS 6, 48). Slightly reconfigured for the Preface to the Origin of the German Mourning Play (GS 1, 216), this remark reverberates among those who have encountered Benjamin’s work. It has a major advantage over Benjamin’s first attempt to characterize truth, for it involves no new terminologies. Yet the concept of death is perhaps less trenchant than the image of the thicket, which, when blended with ‘think’ in accordance with its constitutive overgrowth, suggests that thinking cannot reach truth at all, not even by its death, for it is always already there, ‘in truth’. Some twenty-five years later, Martin Heidegger—with whom Benjamin shared several classes at the Albert-Ludwigs University in Freiburg-im-Breisgau in 1913—published a collection of essays under the title Holzwege. The most accurate translation of the title is not ‘wood paths’ but, rather, ‘paths that lead nowhere’ (Heidegger 1949: 3). A thicket, however, is thicker than any woods in which thinkers find themselves in cul-de-sacs. Unlike a wood, which is deceptively familiar, a thicket is an alien region that robs its trespassers—it has no inhabitants—of any lingering illusion that their failed efforts nevertheless leave sufficient traces that others can follow them and thus acknowledge their leadership. When Benjamin adopts the image of the thinkthicket in his December 1917 letter, he can be heard to respond avant la lettre to the title Heidegger will eventually chose for some of his ‘paths’—and corresponding decisions. ∗ The lines of argument Benjamin develops in his attempt to pursue the ‘Theses on the Problem of Identity’ beyond its inconclusive final paragraphs leads him to the project that results in his highest academic achievement, namely his doctoral degree, which was awarded to him in 1919 upon the submission of his dissertation, Der Begriff der Kunstkritik in der deutschen Romantik (The Concept of Art-Critique in German Romanticism). In his December 1917 letter Benjamin informed Scholem that he no longer intends to write a dissertation on Kant’s theory of history, having read—and been disappointed by—the relevant essays Kant published on history. In his view, which, he admits, may be mistaken, these essays are only concerned with ‘certain historical constellations of ethical interest’ (GB 1, 408). He immediately suggests a new topic, which accords more with neo-Kantian than strictly Kantian modes of interrogation: ‘what does it mean that science is an infinite task?’ (GB 1, 409). This, too, proves untenable, and the reason becomes evident in the only document he seems to have written in conjunction with the project. ‘Die unendliche Aufgabe’ (‘The Infinite Task’). The document ends soon after the following concession is noted: ‘it is nonsense to say that the task of science is infinite!!’ (GS 6, 52). Benjamin did not, however, abandon all thought of producing a major work on the infinite. Instead of the infinitude of science, Benjamin begins his eventual dissertation with an evaluation of the difference between Fichte’s and the early German romantics’ grasp of the infinitude of reflection, in which thinking reflects on itself ad infinitum. 98

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For Fichte, as Benjamin notes—and here I must be entirely schematic—the infinitude of reflection is ‘checked’ by the so-called ‘not-I’, which the absolute I unconsciously posits for itself, so that the true sphere of infinite can unfold in the form of endless moral progress (see GS 1, 25). Not so for the early German romantics, who, with little concern for the promotion of Kantian ethics, at once presuppose and discover something else in the infinitude of a thinking that thinks about thinking. It is easy to see that such thinking goes nowhere, for the supposed thought of itself immediately dissolves into the ongoing activity of thinking. From another perspective, however, the ease with which reflection is dismissed as unproductive hides a corresponding difficulty: how can a thought of such unproductivity present itself as such, that is, as ‘a’ thought? The answer: if the ‘thought’ is at the same time an image. In his December 1917 letter, Benjamin approaches this other perspective through the image of a thicket melded to thinking. The fecundity of the thicket thus redoubles itself in the fecundity of the philosophical thesaurus, which grows a word richer with the introduction of a new terminology. It is as though Benjamin is himself a thicket, producing a new word instead of using old ones. And in the early paragraphs of his dissertation, almost as a digression, Benjamin points to a description of infinitude that appears at first glance to have nothing to do with reflection, yet, as he notes, precisely captures what the writings of the early romantics outline. In one of his ‘late’ writings, Hölderlin, commenting on a Pindar fragment under the title ‘Das Unendliche’ (‘The Infinite’) presents in philosophical language the thicket of thinking, in which everything is connected with everything else, so that there is no space for ‘a’ thought to think about: ‘infinitely (precisely) interconnecting’ [unendlich (genau) zusammenhängen]’ (GS, 1, 26)—such is the ‘true’ infinite.6 At the very beginning of his December 1917 letter to Scholem, Benjamin describes how ‘exuberantly [überschwänglich]’ (GB 1, 406) he looks forward to the publication of a new volume of the critical edition of Hölderlin’s writings, for he has been prepared for what it may contain by the recent publication of the poet’s previously unpublished Pindar commentaries in the literary journal Das Reich. And it is in Das Reich that Benjamin first encountered Hölderlin’s ‘The Infinite’, which became at once the impetus for Benjamin’s construction of the exuberant neologism denkicht and the loadstone of his dissertation. Truth is ‘infinitely (precisely) interconnecting’. The activity of thinking never gets anywhere ‘in truth’ because the interconnections among so-called thoughts are so ‘precise’ (genau) that no (particular, distinct) thought ever forms; yet the intransitive activity of thinking continues apace along ever-twisting and quickly disappearing lines.7

Notes 1 2 3 4

5 6 7

References Benjamin’s writings are abbreviated as follows: GB, Gesammelte Briefe; GS, Gesammelte Schriften. All translations are my own. Goethe’s use of the term can be found in ‘Der Sammler und die Seinigen’ (Goethe 1887–1919: I, 47, 168); see also a letter from 1809 in which he explains that ‘the poetized [das Gedichtete] asserts its right, just as the happening [das Geschehene] does’ (Goethe 1887–1919: IV, 21, 153). This remark is strangely absent from the face-à-face edition. In light of this remark in particular a question arises whether Benjamin engaged with the writings of Avicenna and Maimonides around the idea of the ‘active intellect’. From the extant archive of writings and letters, the answer is ‘no’, but it is not impossible that he became acquainted with their lines of reasoning in his research for a topic for his ‘qualifying dissertation’. Benjamin had made the same remark about Linke (his poor reputation among phenomenologists) in a letter to Scholem from June 1917 (GB 1, 380). For a recent edition of ‘Das Unendliche’, see Hölderlin (1988: 15, 294–95). As I showed elsewhere, Benjamin became familiar around 1916 with certain mathematical functions (continuous yet non-differentiable) that prompted Benoit Mandelbrot to invent the term ‘fractal geometry’ (see Fenves 2011: 103–124)—walking in a thicket follows fractal-like lines.

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References Benjamin, W. (1972–1991) Gesammelte Schriften, (eds.) R. Tiedemann and H. Schweppenhäuser, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Benjamin, W. (1995–2000) Gesammelte Briefe, (eds.) C. Gödde and H. Lonitz, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Fenves, P. (2011) The Messianic Reduction: Walter Benjamin and the Shape of Time, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Frege, G. (1986) Funktion, Begriff, Bedeutung: Fünf logische Studien, (ed.) G. Patzig, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Goethe, J. W. (1887–1919) Werke, (eds.) B. Suphan and O. Harnack, Weimar: Böhlhau. Heidegger, M. (1949) Holzwege, Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann. Hölderlin, F. (1988) Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Textausgabe, (ed.) D. E. Sattler, Darmstadt: Luchterhand. Lichtenberg, G. C. (2012) Philosophical Writings, (ed. and trans.) S. Tester, Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Nietzsche, F. (1988) Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe, (eds.) G. Colli and M. Montinari, Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag. Scholem, G. (1995–2000) Tagebücher, nebst Aufsätzen und Entwürfen bis 1923, (eds.) K. Gründer, H. KoppOberstebrink, and F. Niewöhner with help from K. Grözinger, Frankurt am Main: Jüdischer Verlag. Scholem, G. (1975) Walter Benjamin—die Geschichte einer Freundschaft, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Tagliacozzo, T. (2014) “A=A”: Concetto di identità, matematica e linguaggio in Walter Benjamin e Gershom Scholem, Rivista Italiana di Filosofia del Linguaggio 8: 304–328. Weber, S. (2008) Benjamin’s—Abilities, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wittgenstein, L. (1979) Notebooks, 1914–1916, 2nd ed., (eds.) G. H. von Wright and G. E. M. Anscombe, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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8 FORMAL-SYNTACTICAL THINKING AND THE STRUCTURE OF THE WORLD Paul M. Livingston

It is distinctive of ‘analytic’ philosophy in the twentieth century to see traditional problems of the thinking-being relationship as, essentially, problems of the bearing of language on reality: how do the signs and structures of our finitely formulated and rationally intelligible language come to describe and characterize the facts and objects of the world, as such and as a whole? As I shall argue here, the internal development of this problematic over the course of the tradition establishes not only the specific forms in which this bearing can be rationally comprehended, but also the essential formal limits to which this comprehension is subject. The demonstration of these formally necessary limits then essentially henceforth marks the broader problematic of the thinking-being relationship, most decisively where linguistic reflection considers the implications of its own position within the totality of the world that it thinks. One of the most decisive innovations of analytic philosophy in its initial stages was the prospect, suggested by Wittgenstein but developed most prominently by Carnap, of understanding rational thinking about the world as having the rule-governed formal structure of a language: the finitely tractable ‘logical syntax’ of its well-specified rules of symbolic combination and transformation. A language is, on this conception, essentially a calculus: that is, a structure of signs governed by logical or syntactical rules for formation and transformation that are formal in the sense that they are empty of material content and independent of contingent facts. It is only as such that the signs of a language are, on this conception, capable at all of determinate and non-contradictory application to the description of the world, as all that is the case. But the comprehensive perspective of formal-syntactical thought also necessarily raises—as I shall argue here—the essential problem of the position from which this thought itself takes place. This is the reflexive problem of the position from which it is possible for formal thinking to (1) propound or discover the formal structure of a language and, at the same time (2) ensure its application to the facts and truths of the world as a whole. As the formal results of Gödel and Tarski would soon bear out, this reflexive problem has deep implications for the possible coherence of the project of a comprehensive formal-logical thinking of the structure of the world. In particular, the formalization of the reflexive problem itself, as the problem of the possibility of capturing in a finite language the totality of its own deductive procedures, demonstrates an essential formal undecidability inherent in any envisioned application of such a finitely comprehensible calculus to the unlimited totality of the world. This situation is, most directly, a consequence of the dilemma propounded by Gödel’s two 101

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‘incompleteness’ theorems: namely, that a formally structured language for mathematics cannot without contradiction be seen as, simultaneously, both consistent and complete in its capacity to capture mathematical truths. As Gödel himself argues in a 1951 lecture and several drafts (written between 1953 and 1959) of an unpublished paper critical of Carnap’s formal-syntactical project, the consequences of this situation ultimately demand the rejection of that project, along with the joint assumption of the possible consistency and completeness of a formally specified language that it relies upon. As a result, formally and finitely comprehensible thought is brought, as I argue here, to witness the further dilemma of its own incapacity to grasp the total structure of the world by rational means, or the actual undecidability of that structure itself. ∗ The idea of ‘logical syntax’ or ‘grammar’ as a system of rules governing the correct use of signs in a symbolic language is introduced by Wittgenstein at Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 3.325. In that context, the suggestion responds to a characteristic danger to which we are, according to Wittgenstein, regularly prone in the unreflective use of our everyday language: since superficially similar signs are often used to signify in what are in fact importantly different ways, we are recurrently led to confusions of a fundamental kind, of which he says (in the preceding remark) philosophy is full. Given this, a clarifying logic of signs, which would aim to coordinate each sign to exactly one use, will be necessary to eliminate this kind of error and evince the real underlying structure of our language in its referential or descriptive relation to the world overall. Along with other main theses of the Tractatus—for example, that of propositions as the sensible expressions of thoughts (1921: 3.1), thoughts as logical pictures of facts (3), and pictures as picturing by virtue of their form, and thus independently of what is true or false (1921: 2.2, 2.22)—this suggests the decisive requirement that Wittgenstein now places on the establishment of logical syntax. This is the requirement that the rules for the use of signs overall be formally empty: only the syntactical description of the possible expressions themselves must be mentioned in the establishment of logical-syntactical rules, and it must never be necessary to refer to their referential or descriptive meanings (1921: 3.33). This emptiness of logical syntax then further implies the capacity of a logically syntactically structured language to capture the global structure of the facts of the world, or of all that is the case: to present [stellen … dar], as Wittgenstein says in 6.124, the world’s ‘scaffolding’ [Gerüst] through the identification of those combinations of signs which, as tautologies, say nothing (1921: 6.11) and thereby, through the fact of their being tautologies, show [zeigt] the formal or logical properties of language and the world overall. (1921: 6.12) The formal study of the rules governing possible signs in their empty and arbitrary possibilities of formation and transformation thereby becomes, in a methodologically important sense, the study of the overall logical structure of the facts and phenomena of the world. And the definition and description of these possible rules is the formally empty display, in tautologies, of the logic of the facts of the world as such, and as a whole. A further consequence of this conception which Wittgenstein draws is that the logic of the world cannot be presented within the world. Descriptive propositions, although they can represent all of reality, cannot represent the logical form that they must have in common with it as a whole (1921: 4.12). It is thus impossible for us to express the logical form of reality in assertible propositions, and this structure is rather to be shown by the discernment of logical relations among propositions and the recognition of logical principles as tautologies empty of content (1921: 4.121–22, 6.112–12). Similarly, the equations of mathematics are not propositions with content, and they express no thoughts; rather, they show the logic of the world by showing, without reference to facts, what expressions can be substituted for one another (1921: 6.22–24). In this 102

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way, the clarification of the tautologies of logic and the equations of mathematics, by clarifying the underlying formal rules of use, demonstrate the adequacy of signs to the world as a whole. From the beginning of the Vienna Circle’s discussions, the methodology of the clarification of the logic of language was a key component in the overall project of a ‘scientific’ philosophy dedicated to the logical and epistemological structure of scientific knowledge overall. The conception that the overall logic of science is to be understood, specifically, as ‘nothing other than the logical syntax of the language of science’ became the guiding methodological idea of Carnap’s project in his 1934 The Logical Syntax of Language. Earlier, in his 1928 The Logical Structure of the World, Carnap had sought to describe the unitary totality of scientific facts by means of an overall logical analysis of the underlying structure of the concepts of science and their relations, a so-called ‘constructional system’ for the world as a whole. By 1931, Carnap had been convinced by Otto Neurath of the thesis and project of physicalism: that (as the two philosophers understood the claim) the unity of science, and thus of the world, can be understood to correspond to the universality of a single logically structured language, the so-called ‘physical’ one. In The Logical Syntax, these methodological conceptions combined with Wittgenstein’s idea to produce the project of the analysis of the logical syntax of a language. Such an analysis, Carnap says in introducing the project, will take the form of a ‘systematic statement of the formal rules’ governing the formation and logical transformation of its expressions, together with a statement of the consequences of those rules (Carnap 1934: 1). As in the Tractatus, the rules are to be understood as purely ‘formal’ in that no reference is to be made in stating them either to the referential meaning of any individual signs or to the senses of the expressions as wholes. Rather, the rules are simply to be rules for the combination of signs into certain initial combinations (the so-called ‘formation rules’) and for the transformation of sequences of signs into other sequences (the so-called ‘transformation rules’). Languages themselves are treated as calculi, in the sense that they are systems of ‘conventions or rules’ of this kind, and the practice of logical syntax itself is then nothing other than the ‘construction and manipulation’ of such calculi (Carnap 1934: 4). As Carnap notes, the formal method here invoked bears close parallels to Hilbert’s formalist program in the philosophy of mathematics (Carnap 1934: 9). On this program, claims about the infinite are to be replaced by formulations of finite syntax, thereby gaining application to the statement of general mathematical truths and truths ranging over infinite domains; all that is required for the coherence of this statement is that the relevant systems can be shown to maintain consistency. For Carnap, mathematics is itself logical syntax, in the sense that the carefully constructed languages he envisions contain expressions (at least) for numbers and their relations, along with well-defined rules for the derivation or proof of arithmetical statements in general from formal-syntactic definitions (Carnap 1934: secs. 21, 22, 28, and 32). Although he agrees with Wittgenstein in holding that syntactic rules are empty of content, Carnap differs sharply from Wittgenstein in adding to this the thesis of our complete freedom in propounding them. For Carnap in Syntax, rather than being necessary structures of a unitary language, formal-logical systems are systems of arbitrarily adoptable convention. Each such system defines a language, but there is nothing to constrain the freedom of the logician or philosopher in propounding and exploring the consequences of such systems. In Syntax, Carnap formulates this conventionalist position by means of the overall adoption of what he terms a ‘Principle of Tolerance’. According to this principle, the constructional forms and the rules of transformation can be chosen completely arbitrarily. These arbitrarily chosen rules will then determine what are subsequently to be understood as the ‘meanings’ of the basic logical signs, rather than conversely, and what had seemed to be the study of logical necessities or formally binding truths can cede to the free and self-conscious exploration of the variety of syntactical systems (Carnap 1934: xv, 52). 103

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If it is thus said to be possible for the philosopher or logician to describe or stipulate arbitrary sets of rules of syntax in this way, the question arises of how these rules can themselves be expressed. Is it necessary that the rules governing a specific language be presented in another, different (and perhaps ‘stronger’) language, or is it possible that the rules for a language be represented wholly within it, itself? The first alternative would seem to require, for the complete explication of all the relevant rules, an infinite hierarchy of languages; whereas the second raises the spectre, as Carnap notes, of the paradoxes of self-reference and self-inclusion. Nevertheless, Carnap opts for this latter alternative as a general matter, citing specifically the technique for representing formulas and sentences of a language within that language itself that had recently been developed by Gödel in arriving at his two ‘incompleteness’ theorems. By means of this technique, the so-called ‘arithmetization of syntax’, the expressions can be represented by numbers and the syntax by arithmetical relations of these numbers, so that, provided the system has the expressive power to represent arithmetic, it can also represent its own essential syntactical rules (including the rules of formation and transformation) as a whole. This technique and possibility, as Carnap emphasizes at several points in Syntax, appears to provide a dramatic alternative to Wittgenstein’s view, according to which logical syntax cannot be represented but only shown or indicated at the limits of the world of facts. For it provides that, both with respect to artificially constructed languages and the natural ones whose structure the clarification of logical syntax may help to illuminate, the structure of conventional rules constitutive of a language can, in general, be represented in that language itself. At the same time, however, this opens the significant question of the formal consequences of this kind of linguistic reflexivity, or of the implications of the position of formal-syntactic thought within the scope of the language or languages it, itself, describes. This problem about the extent and limits of a language’s capacity to represent itself within itself would, at any rate, soon have decisive implications for analytic philosophers’ thinking about syntax, semantics, and truth. In 1936, two years after the publication of Syntax, Alfred Tarski considered in his ‘The Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages’ the possibility of a definition of truth for syntactically well-specified languages in general. Such a definition, for Tarski, would take the form of a systematic definition of a predicate holding of just those sentences that are (intuitively) true; that is, just those sentences which say what is the case. In other words, it would have as consequences each of the sentences of the schema T: T: ‘S’ is true iff S A definition of truth that is adequate in this sense will be possible, wherever a language is capable of making reference, in general, to its own sentences, for example by means of quotation marks (as earlier) or by means of a suitable arithmetization device. However, as Tarski argues in ‘The Concept of Truth’, if the language is both ‘universal’ in its expressive resources—able, that is, to make such general reference to any of its own sentences—and understood as capable of formulating its own truth predicate, the formal schema will then necessarily demonstrate the inconsistency of the language in question (Tarski 1936, 164–65). For it will be possible to produce a sentence asserting its own falsehood (this is a version of the classic paradox of the Liar) and then the consequence of the T-schema will be that that sentence is true if false, and vice versa. In ‘The Concept of Truth’, Tarski draws the conclusion that, whereas natural languages such as English which evidently include their own truth-predicates are very likely to be inconsistent, and therefore incapable of consistent overall syntactic analysis, the truth-definition for a (presumably consistent) formal language can nevertheless be carried out,

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provided only that the language in question is not expressively universal in the above sense, and that the truth-definition is, accordingly, not fully definable within it, but only within another language of greater expressive power. The full definition of truth for this language would then, however, evidently need to be carried out in another, stronger one; and so forth indefinitely. This result would play an essential role in convincing philosophers of the ultimate untenability of any purely syntactical conception of truth-conditional meaning in a language overall. Instead, as Tarski already suggests in 1936 and clarifies in the 1944 article ‘The Semantic Conception of Truth’, truth is to be understood not as a purely syntactic but rather a partially semantic notion, in the sense that its formalization depends essentially on claims about the reference or denotation of various terms, and more broadly on the relationship of the language in question to some specifiable (and thus delimited) set of objects external to itself. Familiarly, this ‘semantic’ conception is one of the central roots of the pursuit of formal semantics as (what is later called) ‘model theory’, whereby in addition to the syntactic rules for a language, properties of the language are considered in their representative or referential relationship to objects and relations in such domains. In this way, the problem that is effectively posed in Tarski’s analysis by the inability of the formal syntax of a ‘universal’ language to represent itself led in part to the widespread abandonment by analytic philosophers of the straightforward project of a logical-syntactical analysis, at least with respect to the structure of natural languages of ‘universal’ expressive scope. Nevertheless, as I shall argue in the final section of this paper, equally significant aspects of the formal-syntactical conception nevertheless remain, and continue to characterize central orientational and methodological commitments of central analytic projects up to the present. In particular, a wide variety of such projects they still require that the illumination of underlying and finitely specifiable rules be able to clarify the structural basis of the referential capacities and truth-evaluability of sentences in the language as a whole.1 As such, they require that the consequences of the specifiable rules follow from these logically and with respect to the world as a whole. In this respect, as I shall argue, they also pose the positional question of the place from which these consequences are themselves drawn; and it is the unavoidability of this question which, most directly and comprehensively, exposes constructional thinking to the consequence of the ultimate undecidability of the thinking-being relation it aims to formulate. ∗ The two ‘incompleteness’ theorems that Gödel demonstrated in 1931 bear most directly on finitary formal systems for mathematics, of the type pursued by Hilbert in his formalist program.2 They show (on a relatively uncontroversial formulation) that for any such system capable of representing some portion of arithmetic, if the system is consistent: (1) there will be statements P in the language of the system such that the system does not suffice to prove either P or ~P, and which are thus said to be ‘undecidable’3; and (2) the system cannot prove a statement of its own consistency. If supplemented with the claim, with respect a given ‘undecidable’ statement, that this statement has a determinate truth value (either true or false), then the first result bears out the claim that the system fails to prove at least one truth, and is therefore (in this sense) ‘incomplete’, again on the assumption that it is consistent at all. Together, the two theorems were widely taken to defeat Hilbert’s formalist project of establishing finitary formal systems for mathematics: for they were taken to show that any such system will be unable, if sound (i.e., if it proves no falsehoods) to capture all of the statements that we can nevertheless see to be mathematically true, and further that no such finitary system is able to verify by its own means its own consistency (and hence soundness) at all. 105

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On the basis of the two theorems, Gödel challenged Carnap’s conception of logical syntax in the 1951 Gibbs lecture ‘Some Basic Theorems on the Foundations of Mathematics and Their Implications’, and six drafts, written between 1953 and 1959, of an article entitled ‘Is Mathematics Syntax of Language?’ In the 1951 lecture, Gödel first describes an overall dilemma that evidently characterizes the situation of human mathematical thinking, in view of the two theorems and the equivalence later established by Turing between the structure of formal systems and finite computational machines (i.e., ‘Turing machines’). As a consequence of the second theorem in particular, which shows that no well-defined system of axioms and rules can prove a statement of its own consistency (and hence its own correctness or soundness, since a system is [presumably] sound only if consistent), it is contradictory for anyone to set up such a finite system and claim to know simultaneously both that the system is complete—sufficient to establish all mathematical truths—and that it is correct (Gödel 1951: 309). For the claimed insight into the correctness of the system, and hence its consistency, is, if real (due to second theorem) a mathematical insight that cannot be derived in the system itself; and so by that very insight, there is a truth that goes beyond what the system can prove, and thus the system is then not complete. This leads Gödel to state a more general dilemma which then plausibly characterizes the situation of our own mathematical cognition relative to that of finite formal systems. Given that it has been proved that, for any such system, there will be arithmetical statements whose truthvalue the specified system cannot decide, either our own powers of mathematical cognition to establish such truths (including the statements of the consistency of the relevant systems themselves) exceed those of any such system, or they do not. In the first case, the human mind is capable of infinitely exceeding the capacities of any possible Turing machine, in that it can again and again see as evident ever-new mathematical truths that cannot be, as a whole, comprised by any finite rule. On the second alternative, however (on which the mind is after all equivalent to some particular formal system), there will then always be certain straightforward types of arithmetic statements that are absolutely undecidable: undecidable, that is, by any proof that the mind can conceive (Gödel 1951: 310). However, on either alternative, Gödel argues, some form of realism about mathematical objects and truths appears to follow, in that it is untenable to suppose (on either alternative) that mathematics is our ‘free creation’. On the first alternative, whereby the mind’s power to grasp certain mathematical truths exceeds that of any finite system, it is evidently the case that this power must then be conceived as essentially going beyond anything that we (as finite beings) can create. However, on the second alternative as well (that of absolutely unsolvable problems) it appears implausible that the truths are created by us, since if they were, in creating them we would necessarily know all of their properties; and in view of the absolute insolubility of the relevant problems (on this alternative), we do not. Gödel now addresses specifically Carnap’s conception of logical syntax as ‘the most precise, and at the same time most radical, formulation’ that has been given so far of the view that mathematical propositions are expressions solely of our own syntactic/linguistic conventions. On the view as Gödel sketches it, mathematical propositions are, as a whole, consequences of syntactic conventions that do not refer to any extralinguistic objects, and are thus analytic in the sense that they are empty of content and do not imply the truth or falsity of any factual proposition (Gödel 1951: 315–16).4 As Gödel recognizes, and as Carnap has shown in Logical Syntax (following an earlier demonstration by Ramsey), the truth of standard sets of axioms for mathematical inference (for example the axioms of Peano Arithmetic) can indeed be shown to be derivable from suitably chosen purely syntactic rules in this sense. However—and here is the decisive objection—the derivation even of the basic axioms from the semantic rules must itself make extensive use of mathematical concepts and principles, in application to the syntax, that cannot themselves be known to be true unless the axioms and their consequences are already so 106

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known. Further, and even more decisively, a proof of the possibility of deriving the axioms from syntactical conventions (and hence of their purely tautological character) is at the same time a proof of the consistency of those axioms themselves; and, as a result of the second ‘incompleteness’ theorem, this proof is impossible using only those axioms themselves. The verification of the following of the axioms from the syntactic rules—and thus their emptiness and purely tautological status—must then require knowledge of mathematical truths that essentially goes beyond what can be derived from these axioms themselves. It follows, for any finitely specifiable set of syntactic rules, that even the possibility of portraying those rules as the syntactic basis for a system of axioms requires knowledge of the truth of propositions that can be shown to go beyond any that can be derived from those rules. For this reason, Gödel concludes, ‘there exists no rational justification of our precritical beliefs concerning the applicability and consistency of classical mathematics (nor even its undermost level, number theory) on the basis of a syntactical interpretation’, (Gödel 1951: 318) and, at least with respect to mathematical propositions, this conception is to be rejected. In version III (the longest draft version) of ‘Is Mathematics Syntax of Language?’ Gödel repeats and extends the criticism, citing not only Carnap but also Hahn and Schlick as adherents to the conception according to which mathematics can be interpreted as (finitary) syntax of language. On any such conception, it will be the case, first, that the formal axioms and procedures of mathematics can be derived from purely syntactical rules; and secondly, that in the case of any conclusion about ascertainable empirical facts that were formerly justified in part by means of intuitive mathematical considerations, those considerations can be replaced by the consequences of purely syntactical rules. However, as Gödel argues, this will be possible only in the presence of a consistency proof for those rules. For example, from a formal-syntactic proof of the truth of Goldbach’s conjecture (every even number > 2 is the sum of two primes) it would be possible to predict the empirical behavior of a certain calculating machine from the syntactic conventions, but only if they are known to be consistent; otherwise, as Gödel points out, they make no determinate prediction about the possible behavior of the machine at all (Gödel 1953: 339–40). In light of the second theorem, however, any possible proof of such consistency necessarily relies on mathematical principles that go beyond any that can be derived from those rules themselves. Thus, in order to justify the syntactical program, the whole program must be ‘turned into its downright opposite’ (Gödel 1953: 341–42) in the sense that, instead of specifying the conceptual meanings of mathematical terms by pointing to syntactical rules, it must instead make essential and extended use of these meanings to establish these very rules as consistent, and hence applicable, at all. Finally, both here and in the 1951 lecture, Gödel points out another consequence of the issue of consistency which appears devastating, not only to Carnap’s specific formulation of the logical-syntactical project but for the broader logical positivist strategy of separating propositions into the categories of the empirical-factual (or synthetic) and formal-logical (or analytic) at all. Since, under standard logical assumptions, a contradiction implies all sentences, in the absence of knowledge of the consistency of the formal-syntactic rules it will not be known that these rules do not have as consequences all sentences of the language, whether they be of ‘formal’ or ‘empirical’ character. It will thus be impossible to consider the sentences of the language to be separable, as a whole, into the two categories of those bearing empirical content and those, expressive only of the syntactical conventions, which lack it. Indeed, since the statements intended to capture syntactic rules cannot then be shown to be empty of content, it appears impossible to consider any set of them as capturing wholly and exclusively the meanings of terms in the language overall, and the underlying conception of a language as a structure or system of such purely syntactical rules is thereby defeated. 107

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All of these considerations directed against the coherence of the logical-syntactical conception of mathematics turn on the proven inability of finitary systems of rules (in the sense of a finitary formal system or a Turing machine) to establish, by finite means, the truth or falsity of certain further mathematical statements (including the statement of the system’s own consistency) whose truth would have to be known in order to establish any meaningful application of these rules themselves. We can put this consideration, in general terms, as that of the undecidability of the application of formal-syntactical rules beyond themselves: their inability, that is, to establish their own total application to the range of formal truths they are supposed to underlie, and to the overall distinction between formal and empirical truths itself.5 If, as Gödel argues, this undecidability of application is a necessary feature of any finitely formulable system of rules, then it will follow that the logical syntax of any finitely specifiable language is undecidable in general. Every finitely specifiable language will contain infinitely many sentences that are undecidable by its own syntactical rules, and it will moreover be impossible to restrict the range of undecidability to those sentences that are meant to be empirical as opposed to those that are supposed to express purely formal truths. As a consequence, the formal structure purportedly underlying truth-conditional meaning in the language as a whole will itself be undecidable in this sense: any finitary specification of the syntactic rules will then leave this meaning radically undetermined, and the logical syntax project will fail in general. As commentators have emphasized and as Gödel himself notes, to the extent that Carnap at the time of Logical Syntax has a response to these objections, it turns on the latter’s invocation of infinitary means of proof and demonstration. In particular, in Syntax, Carnap (1934: 39) distinguishes between the kind of finitary method of deduction suggested by Hilbert, wherein a derivation is a finite series of sentences, and (what Carnap understands as) a broader method, which he calls the ‘method of the consequence-series’. By contrast with finitary derivations, a deduction by the latter method may be a deduction from (simultaneously) a set of infinitely many sentences as premises, or from any finite number of such sets: a deduction carried out in this way will then not be ‘definite’ in each of its steps in the way that a finite derivation is, but will nevertheless establish (Carnap says) that its result follows from its (possibly infinitely many) premises as a ‘consequence’ (Carnap 1934: 39). Analytic sentences, or tautologies, are then defined as those that are ‘consequences’, in this sense, of the empty set of sentences of the language, and thus (also) of every sentence, and it is possible in this way, according to Carnap, to verify the tautological character of mathematical sentences in general, as well as confirm various broader properties of the specific formal languages investigated. It is this appeal to the infinitary method of deduction that allows Carnap, in Logical Syntax, to avoid or re-situate what are normally seen as the problematic consequences of Gödel’s theorems, of which Carnap was well aware at the time. For example, by means of the application of such an infinitary deduction rule, the consistency of the specific Language II constructed by Carnap can, he holds, be demonstrated, albeit by means that, as he says, go essentially ‘beyond the resources at the disposal of Language II’ itself (Carnap 1934: 129). Indeed, more generally, the demonstration of the non-contradictoriness of any language will, quite plausibly in the light of Gödel’s results, require such means that go beyond its own (Carnap 1934: 134, 219). Thus, it is necessary, according to Carnap, to formulate any such demonstration for a particular language, S, in another language S1, and so on; indeed, anticipating Tarski’s results of two years later, Carnap here indicates that such a methodology will be necessary for any coherent treatment of a language’s truth-predicate (Carnap 1934: 216). Similarly, since (by Gödel’s first theorem), any language capable of expressing arithmetic, if consistent at all, will include sentences that are undemonstrable by its means, each such system is ‘defective’ in the sense that it cannot by its own means determine the truth-value of all arithmetical sentences formulable 108

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within it. But this does not imply, Carnap suggests, any actual indeterminacy, since each such sentence may indeed be decided in another system. In this sense, and for this reason, although ‘there exists neither a language in which all arithmetical terms can be defined nor one in which all arithmetical sentences are resoluble [decidable]’, it nevertheless remains the case that ‘everything mathematical can be formalized’ by means of the continual progress of the methods of demonstration through an infinite series of languages, each stronger than the last (Carnap 1934: 222). Whereas Carnap thus seeks to immunize the logical-syntactic conception of the consequences of essential undecidability and the indemonstrability of consistency by appeal to such a hierarchy of languages and the non-finitary consequence rule, Gödel by contrast takes the appeal to such non-finitary means to be a reductio of the whole logical-syntactical program. For, as he points out, any such appeal that is sufficient to establish (so much as) the consistency of our logical-syntactical conventions, and hence their applicability to any sentences beyond themselves, will involve mathematical knowledge beyond that which can be established by their finitary application alone. It is not that Gödel himself disbelieves, in general, in the possibility of such non-finitary knowledge, including knowledge of the consistency of any set of conventions which we do in fact formulate, at a particular time, as capturing our practices of mathematical reasoning. This knowledge might be gained, for instance, by our being able to have, in each case, a non-syntactic (and non-methodical) intuition of the relevant truth; or it might be seen as grounded in our ability to perceive certain substantive facts, going beyond linguistic conventions, about the relationships of their constitutive concepts.6 We might, indeed, be capable of, again and again, formulating the newly gained knowledge in finitary terms, for example, as new axioms continually introduced (albeit not into a single language, since the new formulation would produce a new language in each case). But what Gödel points out is that, if we appeal to this possibility of iterated reflection in general, we are no longer appealing to syntactic considerations in any real sense. Rather, we are here appealing to capacities for knowledge that must essentially exceed the operation of any finite structure or mechanism, and thus must (infinitely) exceed anything we can capture completely by means of any linguistic formulations that we can understand at all.7 It follows that, if we can indeed represent the envisioned capacities to ourselves, we will not represent them as rational ones; and, if we do in fact possess them, we will not be able to make this possession rationally intelligible to ourselves. We can put this consideration in vivid form by considering what is required, as a matter of epistemic position, of any knower who would in fact be capable of applying one of Carnap’s purported infinitary rules of deduction. A simple form of such a rule is the so-called ‘omegarule’, which ‘instructs’ its user to conclude ∀xϕ(x) from the infinitely many distinct premises ϕ(1), ϕ(2), ϕ(3), and so on, for every natural number. The inference appears at first relatively unproblematic, but it is important to note that in order to form the basis for the application of the rule, the infinitely many premises must first be independently known: each one, that is, established ‘on its own’, without any evident rule uniting them all. The knowledge of the truth of these infinitely many premises cannot be, for example, the result of an application of the usual (finitely formulable) rule of mathematical induction: for if that rule were sufficient, the general conclusion could already be established on its basis, without any need to appeal to infinitary procedures. Rather, the knower who is able to apply the infinitary ‘rule’ must already be in a position to know the properties of each number without inferring these directly from the properties of any other: ‘one by one’, so to speak. But what kind of knower could be in such a position? We can imagine such a knower, apparently, only as one who is capable of a kind of infinite survey of all natural numbers, or at any rate capable of performing infinitely many finite procedures at once. To credit a knower 109

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with these capacities is, however, evidently to credit her with the ability to know the properties of each natural number even before carrying out the (purported) infinite deduction; and to do this would be, presumably, to beg the question of the extent of her possible knowledge from the position she is envisioned as occupying. If, however, we cannot characterize a putative knower as applying an infinitary rule to gain mathematical knowledge unless we portray her as already possessing the relevant knowledge, then the appeal to the infinitary rule is idle, and cannot support the claim that there are rational procedures capable in general of yielding the relevant knowledge. But then, the only evident alternative is to portray the means we have of attaining this knowledge as consisting in something other than rational procedures, if we are capable of attaining it at all.8 ∗ As we have seen, if the considerations that Gödel introduces against the coherence of the formal-syntactical project are understood as posing the broader problem of the position that rational thought occupies in thinking the structure of the world, then it is plausible that this thought faces, as such, a general positional dilemma. The dilemma is that, in order to verify that it is so much as coherent, it must have recourse to knowledge that it cannot represent itself to itself as capable of establishing by its own means. The rational thought of structure must, then, either have recourse to what are essentially extra-rational (for instance intuitive) means of knowledge about the infinite, or content itself with the consequence of the inherent undecidability of its own attempt to extend its structure to the comprehension of the world as such. If this dilemma is indeed general, it does not turn essentially on any of the specific features of Carnap’s logical-syntax project on which commentators have focused, and which subsequent analytic-philosophical positions have learned to overcome. For example, it does not arise specifically from his conventionalism, or from the specific demand that logical syntax be empty of content, or from the specific aim of his project for the construction of multiple linguistic calculi in accordance with the methodical ‘Principle of Tolerance’. Indeed, it appears to characterize any project that attempts to demonstrate the entailment of the totality of facts of the world from some more restricted (but finitely comprehensible) set of facts or truths about its structure. In this final section, I shall consider briefly how the dilemma might be formulated, and what kind of problem it might pose, for two recent projects of this general form. In his 2012 book, Constructing the World, David Chalmers proposes and details a project, explicitly analogous to Carnap’s own project of structural explication in the Aufbau, of accounting for the totality of truths on the basis of a more restricted ‘compact’ class of basic truths. More specifically, the totality of truths is argued to be scrutable from a narrower subset of them, where a truth S is scrutable from a class C, roughly, if a subject of a particular kind who knew all of the truths in class C would be in a position to know the truth S (Chalmers 2012: 40).9 Further, a subject is said to be ‘in a position to know’ a truth when it is possible that the subject could come to know that truth from the subject’s current position and without gaining any further empirical information (2012: 49). Various possibilities for this subset (the ‘scrutability base’) are considered, but most centrally Chalmers argues that a sufficient base could plausibly consist in a collection of physical truths, qualitative or phenomenal truths, certain indexical truths, and finally a ‘that’s all’ truth specifying that the world is a minimal world with respect to those (other) truths (2012: 108–12). Somewhat similarly, in his 2011 Writing the Book of the World, Theodore Sider argues for the possibility of giving a ‘fundamental’ description of the world by describing its metaphysically 110

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underlying structure. In particular, Sider argues, metaphysical inquiry can elicit a determination of a privileged class of predicates and other expressions (including logical ones) which ‘carve at the joints’ of reality’s ‘true’ or most ‘fundamental’ structure, so that the determination and clarification of these expressions amounts to a way of ‘figuring out the right categories for describing the world’ (Sider 2011: 1). The analysis of claims and expressions in ordinary language will then take the form of a reductive ‘metaphysical semantics’ which will show how these claims and expressions in general can be reduced to those couched in the privileged language of the ‘joint-carving’ ones, those which capture in a privileged way the underlying structure of the world as a whole. In Chalmers’ account, the subject who is relevant to the assessment of the reducibility thesis is idealized in various ways. For instance, she possesses ‘any concept that it is possible to possess’, is able to entertain arbitrarily complex thoughts (possibly, Chalmers says, including infinite conjunctions of finite thoughts), and is capable of reasoning that is idealized in permitting rational calculations and proofs with arbitrarily many steps. Further, she never makes mistakes in reasoning, is sensitive to all relevant reasons for judgment, and can use ‘any possible reasoning processes, regardless of whether humans actually use those processes’ (Chalmers 2012: 63). All of these idealizations are meant to be extensions to the infinite of capacities and conceptual possessions that are already exercised and possessed in a more limited way by ordinary (finite) subjects. At the same time, however, in order to underwrite the scrutability thesis and thus the (idealized) knowability of all truths, they will require not only that these capacities be extended from the finite to the infinite, but also that the extension be complete: that the envisaged procedures extend, in other words, to the knowing the totality of the world or to all that is the case. As we have seen, however, in light of the considerations that Gödel raises against the coherence of Carnap’s logical-syntax project, there is an important and general reflexive problem for any such specification, grounded in the essential positional features of the reflexive moment by which rational thinking articulates its own procedures. The problem is that any such specification of procedures will evince infinitely many statements that are undecidable by those procedures, making it impossible coherently to see (from any perspective) the envisaged procedures as embodying principles that are simultaneously both consistent and complete in their extension to all that is the case. At any rate, it is clear at this point how the dilemma that we have discussed threatens the general claim of reducibility, or of the rational knowability of the totality of truths given only knowledge of the base class: either what is known in knowing the base class is already inconsistent, or it is not rationally extendible (by means of any coherently specifiable procedures, finitary or infinitary) to knowledge of the totality of truths. Chalmers discusses considerations arising from Gödel’s theorems in a section of Constructing the World specifically addressing mathematical truths as one species of ‘hard cases’ for the success of the scrutability thesis (2012: 261–64). As he puts the issue in the section, the challenge for the scrutability of all truths from the basis consisting only in physical, phenomenal, and indexical truths that is posed most centrally by Gödelian considerations is the possibility that, in light of Gödel’s theorems, there are some (mathematical, as well as second-order logical) truths that are not rationally knowable (i.e., are not knowable by any reasoner) a priori; and are, thus, not knowable by any agent (no matter how idealized) who knows only the truths in the scrutability base. In light of the positional issues we have discussed, it is not clear that this is the right way to put the problem posed by the Gödelian considerations: it is plausible, in particular, that the problem is not that of whether there are truths that are not scrutable from any position, but rather that of whether there is any (one) position from which all truths (of the relevant kind) are scrutable. Leaving that aside, however, Chalmers argues that it is possible to vindicate the scrutability thesis by ‘idealizing away from’ our capacity to consider only finitely many cases at once, or from the requirement that 111

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proofs have only finitely many premises. In particular, Chalmers suggests, we can do so by appealing to just the kind of infinitary consequence ‘rule’ that Carnap himself appealed to, as we saw, in defending the claim of the overall consistency of specific syntactically formulated languages. As Carnap already suggested and Chalmers notes, if this sort of ‘rule’ can be appealed to, it will be possible by means of it to settle the truth-value of every statement of arithmetic (albeit not within a single finitely specifiable language), and a kind of completeness will apparently follow. Given this, the question of the coherence of the envisaged perspective, and hence of the scrutability of all truths of the relevant kind, becomes that of the extent to which it is coherent to see the ‘procedure’ of a purportedly infinitary reasoner in applying such a rule as (something that is really coherently understandable as) a ‘procedure’ at all. But as we saw above, there are serious doubts to be raised here about the extent to which we can indeed see such an envisaged thinker as engaging rational procedures at all. In particular, it is not clear that we can credit any agent with the ability to carry out such a ‘procedure’, unless we are in a position already to credit her with knowledge of all properties of all numbers (and hence all arithmetical truths) already; but to do so would obviously be question-begging in this context. Moreover, even if there is some idealized knower who can use such infinitary rules to arrive at arbitrary truths, she will not be able to express the methodical basis of her results in any (single, consistent) language that we can understand. But even if the relevant idealization is, after all, coherent with respect to arithmetic truths, there will still be important perspectival and positional issues of a more general kind arising from the Gödelian considerations, and plausibly bearing against any attempt to describe the totality of truths as consequences of a comprehensibly limited subset thereof. For as we have seen, if any such basis is to be seen as (so much as) consistent, this insight itself must go beyond anything that is rationally inferable from it, and so the envisaged base is then, by light of that very consideration, insufficient to establish all the relevant truths. If this consideration can indeed be generalized, then it appears to have the consequence that any specifiable scrutability base that an agent can know as such is then known to be either inconsistent (in which case it is hardly useful as a base at all) or incomplete, and the overall scrutability thesis fails. Something similar appears to be the case with respect, as well, to Sider’s project of determining the structure of the world as a matter of the ‘metaphysical semantics’ of ‘fundamental’ structure. Although Sider is much less explicit than Chalmers, in general, about the positional commitments of the project or its claims about the possibility of knowing truths in general on the basis of known truths about structure, it is clear that the claims that he does make for the completeness of the fundamental truths invite similar problems. For example, Sider holds (in a preliminary formulation) that ‘every nonfundamental truth holds in virtue of some fundamental truth’ and (in a more precise one) that ‘every sentence that contains expressions that do not carve at the joints’ can be analyzed, in principle, into sentences in terms purely of the ‘metaphysical semantics’ of expressions that do (2011: 105, 115). Sider says that the analysis need not yield a reduction to purely syntactic notions (2011: 113), and it need not yield explicit definitions or match intuitive judgments of cognitive significance (2011: 117). But it is clear that for the project to work, it must nevertheless be possible in principle to see the totality of truths (or sentences) as grounded (in principle) by that comprehensible (thinkable) subset of them which are expressible purely in structural or ‘joint-carving’ terms. And given this, it appears evident that the kind of general positional consideration that we have discussed here will apply. In particular: given any coherent conception of the ‘fundamental’ truths overall, we can pose the question of how and whether the way in which these truths are said to ground all truths is itself included in those truths. In view of the Gödelian positional considerations, it appears likely that it cannot, on pain of contradiction, coherently be seen as so included. It is 112

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then hard to see how the constructivist project can succeed, except by simply ignoring this kind of positional consideration: ignoring, that is, the problem of the position of rational thinking itself, in relation to the totality of what it can think. If, on the other hand, the positional issue is taken seriously, and as bearing in an important way on the question of the space of possibilities open to contemporary thought, what general conclusions can we draw? As we have seen, Gödel’s argument against Carnap plausibly witnesses a general and comprehensive dilemma for rational thought’s understanding of itself in application to the totality of the world. In view of these considerations, the rational thought of finite beings is not apparently in a position to secure its own applicability to the world as such by means of a discernment of its ‘fundamental’ or underlying structure.10 However, if the considerations explored here thus plausibly demonstrate the failure of the constructivist attempt to understand the thinking-being relationship in structuralist terms, the phenomenon of undecidability which lies at their root may nevertheless bear important implications for any contemporary understanding of the overall form of this relationship itself. For if it appears, as we have seen, to verify the essential incompleteness of any purportedly overall discernment of the world’s structure, it simultaneously appears to indicate the unlimited possibility for thought ever again to revolutionize itself in its recurrently inexhaustible reflection of it.

Notes 1 For a variety of these contemporary ‘structuralist’ projects, see Livingston (2008: chap. 1). 2 That is, those that either have a finite number of axioms and derivation rules or are, at least, ‘axiomatizable’ in that the axiomhood of arbitrary sentences is (finitely) decidable. For details of the formalist project, see, e.g., Hilbert (1925). 3 This statement in fact requires the slightly strengthened version of Gödel’s first theorem that is due to Rosser in 1936. 4 See, especially, Gödel’s footnote 23. 5 It is worth noting that the situation, on this formulation, resembles that which plausibly leads to one of the main concerns of the later Wittgenstein’s investigation of the problem of rules and their application in Wittgenstein (1951: sec. 201): namely that since no rule can apparently determine its own application, each application seems to require a new interpretation, leading to an apparent infinite regress. 6 For this kind of ‘Platonist’ suggestion, see, in particular, Gödel (1961). 7 It is this consequence of Gödel’s views of the relationship of mathematical thought to its linguistic formulation that confirms most directly his adherence to what I called (in Livingston (2012)) the ‘generic’ orientation of thought (by contrast with Carnap’s thoroughgoing adherence to the ‘constructivist’ orientation): for the four orientations of thought, see, e.g., Livingston (2012: chap. 1); for Carnap’s constructivism, see (2012: chap. 2); and for Gödel as a ‘generic’ thinker, see (2012: 328). 8 I am indebted to John Bova for some of the considerations in this paragraph. 9 There are various formulations of slightly different scrutability relations (inferential scrutability, conditional scrutability, and a priori scrutability), but I will ignore these differences in what follows. 10 Indeed, in view of the generality of the conclusion, it seems as if something similar will apply to many other current attempts to characterize ‘fundamental’ notions and truths in application to the totality of facts, including such notions as those of privileged ‘natural’ features and properties, ‘genuine features’, ‘intrinsic properties’, ‘metaphysical furniture’, as well as related ideas about privileged ways of connecting linguistic terms to entities, properties, and features. In each such case, we can ask whether a coherent specification of the relevantly fundamental truths would include the basis for applying that set of truths to the totality, and in light of the Gödelian considerations in each case it seems it could not.

References Carnap, R. (1934) The Logical Syntax of Language, (trans.) A. Smeaton, Paterson, NJ: Littlefield, Adams & Co., 1959.

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Paul M. Livingston Chalmers, D. J. (2012) Constructing the World, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gödel, K. (1951) Some Basic Theorems on the Foundations of Mathematics and their Implications, in S. Feferman (ed.), Kurt Gödel: Collected Works, Vol. III, New York: Oxford University Press. Gödel, K. (1953) Is Mathematics Syntax of Language? Version III, in S. Feferman (ed.), Kurt Gödel: Collected Works, Vol. III, New York: Oxford University Press. Gödel, K. (1959) Is Mathematics Syntax of Language? Version V, in S. Feferman (ed.), Kurt Gödel: Collected Works, Vol. III, New York: Oxford University Press. Gödel, K. (1961) The Modern Development of the Foundations of Mathematics in the Light of Philosophy, in S. Feferman (ed.), Kurt Gödel: Collected Works, Vol. III, New York: Oxford University Press. Goldfarb, W. (1995) Introductory Note to Gödel’s “Is Mathematics Syntax of Language?”, in S. Feferman (ed.), Kurt Gödel: Collected Works, Vol. III, New York: Oxford University Press. Hilbert, D. (1925) On the Infinite, in J. van Heijenoort (ed.), From Frege to Gödel: A Source Book in Mathematical Logic, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Livingston, P. M. (2008) Philosophy and the Vision of Language, New York: Routledge. Livingston, P. M. (2012) The Politics of Logic: Badiou, Wittgenstein, and the Consequences of Formalism, New York: Routledge. Sider, T. (2011) Writing the Book of The World, Oxford: Clarendon. Tarski, A. (1937) The Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages, in J. H. Woodger (trans.), Logic, Semantics, Metamathematics: Papers from 1923 to 1938, 2nd ed., Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. Wittgenstein, L. (1921) Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, (trans.) D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness, New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Wittgenstein, L. (1953) Philosophical Investigations, (trans.) G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker and J. Schulte, Revised 4th ed., Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

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PART III

Images and thinking from Plotinus to Unger

9 PLOTINUS Philosophical thinking as self-creation Panayiota Vassilopoulou

γένοι, οἷος ἐσσὶ μαθών. Become such as you are, having learned what that is. Pindar, Pythian 2, 73.

1 Introduction One of the most striking differences between ancient and modern philosophy concerns the views philosophers hold on the significance and value of philosophy as a theoretical practice with practical and existential implications. On this topic, there is clear consensus in the ancient Greek tradition: despite their significant differences in orientation and doctrine, Platonists and Epicureans, Cynics and Stoics, Sceptics and Peripatetics, would all agree that the philosophical life, as each group understood it, is the best, or the least bad, form of life available to human beings. The claim for the superiority of philosophy is elaborated in a variety of ways in the works of these philosophers. However, the most telling evidence for this valuation of philosophy is the existence of a distinct philosophical genre, that of the protreptic to philosophy, which, from the time of Antisthenes (c. 400 BC) to that of Themistius (c. 380 AD), functioned, depending on one’s views, either as a form of advertisement for marketing philosophy, or as a call for a conversion that could radically change the life of the individual who would accept the invitation (see Collins 2015). Today, it would be, of course, very difficult to write a protreptic to philosophy in the classical vein. Since the end of antiquity, many of the existential and practical functions of philosophy have been taken over by religious discourses and practices. With the advent of modernity, the persistent waves of criticism of metaphysics, the increasing doubt in the relevance of reason for practical matters, the call for a ‘naturalized’ philosophy as a form of reflection on scientific methods and results, and the denouncement of philosophy as an ideological exercise of power, would render implausible not only any claim for the superiority of philosophy, but also any conception of philosophy as something beyond an academic discipline practiced by a small group of professionals in the context of an ever-growing intellectual division of labour.1 The ancient valuation of philosophy rests on two distinct claims, both of which have been studied extensively in the relevant literature. On the one hand, according to its ancient 117

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conception, philosophy is not merely an intellectual pursuit aiming at some kind of knowledge, but rather ‘a mode of existing-in-the-world, which had to be practiced at each instant, and the goal of which was to transform the whole of the individual’s life’ (Hadot 1995: 265).2 On the other hand, the superiority of philosophy as ‘a mode of existing-in-the-world’ is directly related to its being the purest form of contemplative life, under the assumption that a contemplative life, i.e., a life spent in thinking, reflecting or contemplating, is superior to an active life, i.e., a life directed at acting, making or creating. The starkest elaborations of the latter claim are to be found in the works of Plato, Aristotle and the philosophers who followed in their tradition. However, the problem implicated in the claim in its various ramifications, i.e., the relation between the search for truth or knowledge and the search for power or pleasure, the choice between a public life of action and a private life of study, the tension between the divine and the mortal elements in human nature, was evidently central to every school of ancient philosophy.3 Plotinus shares both these assumptions in their strongest versions. For Plotinus, philosophy is a way of life in which philosophers participate in a manner that engages and shapes their entire existential orientation: it is impossible, for instance, ‘for someone to be wise and a dialectician’ without possessing at the same time the ordinary moral virtues of a good human being (I.3[20].6.16–17).4 However, philosophy is a superior way of life precisely to the extent that it is characterised by forms and practices of theoretical activity. It is in the intersection of these broad claims that the core issue of the present discussion lies. If thinking can transform something (namely, the thinkers, their selves, their lives), then the relation between thinking and making is more complicated than that of a mere opposition, since thinking itself would seem to be a form of making, even if in some highly qualified sense. The question then becomes: how could pure thinking, a thinking that is not subordinate to the requirements of guiding an ordinary instance of acting or making, have a creative aspect, and be conceived itself as a form of making associated with the practical interests of the subject? The discussion that follows develops in four sections. I begin with an overview of the relation between thinking and making in Plotinus and the way this relation appears both at the level of the metaphysical structure of reality and of ordinary human activity. The main point of this section is to show that, although Plotinus clearly subordinates making to thinking in a variety of ways, he also establishes a close inter-connection between the two and recognises the importance of several instances and forms of creativity. In the next section, I offer an account of the kind of intellectual activity that Plotinus has in mind when he claims that the life of philosophical contemplation is preferable or superior to the life of action or creation. The main aim of this section is to support the claim that, given the requirements imposed on that kind of thinking, one has to construe it is as a form of creative self-intellection, an activity through which a subject of thought is constituted by creating the objects of its thought as internal to it. According to Plotinus, this activity can be compared favourably with ordinary forms of making, doing, or even thinking, on the basis of its self-contained or self-sufficient nature. The next section goes beyond this claim to self-sufficiency and examines the motivation and the external conditions of this activity in order to gain better insight into the creative aspects of philosophical thinking. Finally, I return to philosophical practice in order to place it within the context created by the main discussion. Placed against the background shaped by an interpretation of Plotinus’ principal metaphysical and epistemological tenets that reconstruct the relationship between thinking and making, our focus will be the philosopher’s experience and its transformative aspects. If, for Plotinus, the primary importance of philosophy is that it is the best way to ‘lead us up to that place where we must journey’, i.e., that it enables us to reach ‘the Good and the first principle’, a destination ‘agreed and shown by means of many arguments’ (I.3[20].1.2–5), we are justified to ask not 118

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only ‘what must the person be like who is to ascend’ (I.3[20].1.7), but also how this person will be transformed by engaging in philosophical thinking, how and why one could make a self for oneself by thinking philosophically.

2 Thinking and making A useful starting point for discussing the relation between contemplation and creation in Plotinus could well be the ‘craft’ model articulated in Plato’s Timaeus. Plato’s construal of this relation has been tremendously influential; moreover, its role in accounting for the origins of the universe added significantly to its importance. Plotinus was intimately familiar with Plato’s position and clearly responded to it. In the Timaeus, Plato explains the origin and structure of the universe by presenting it as the creation of a divine Craftsman, who: 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

has theoretical access to a pre-existing intelligible, eternal, and perfect model or paradigm that guides his creative activity (pre-existence and primacy of the theoretical paradigm) (29a–b) works by forming or ordering pre-existing material that is separate both from him and the intelligible model. This material is to some extent receptive to his ordering activity, but at the same time resists and introduces an inevitable element of disorder (pre-existence and independence of the material) (30a; 48a; 53b) aims explicitly at producing an object that would be the best possible given the limitations of the material. This aim entails technical and instrumental reasoning connecting the means of his creative activity to its ends and overcoming relevant difficulties (creation as deliberate technical effort) (30a) creates a final product that is entirely separate from him. At the end of his creative project he returns to his original state without having suffered any internal alteration by his creative activity (full separation between the creator and his creation) (42e) engages in this creative project not as a result of an indifferent free choice, but as a direct consequence of his nature, i.e., his goodness and his desire (which is in itself an expression of his goodness) to make ‘everything […] as similar to himself [as good] as possible’ (creation motivated by the goodness of a powerful creator) (29e).5

In order to understand Plotinus’ response to Plato’s model, we may start from his claim that there are instances of activity that are entirely self-directed and self-sufficient. This kind of activity, which he calls in different contexts internal or independent ‘activity of the substance’ (e.g., IV.5[29].7.15–17; VI.1[42].22.3–5) and which he attributes to all substances as their own proper activity (V.4[7].2.27–31), does not involve reference to an external object or state that would be the product, condition, or motivation of the activity. In other words, in these instances there is no interaction between the active entity and its external reality. This claim suggests a metaphysics of self-sufficiency: a substance can engage in its proper activity, i.e., be what it is supposed to be, without any need for external objects or conditions. In contrast, any type of activity occasioned or motivated by a state of deficiency that can only be satisfied by some external object or condition, or more generally directed in some way at an external object, indicates the lack of full self-sufficiency of the agent who undertakes it: For what reason would it have to produce anything when it is not in any way deficient? […] Rather, the ability to produce something by itself belongs to what is not 119

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completely in a satisfactory state but produces and moves itself precisely where it is itself inferior. (III.2[47].1.37–39; cf. V.3[49].6.39–40, 7.13–15, 12.33)6 The specific nature of this internal activity will differ in various substances, but for the three fundamental hypostases or principles of Plotinus’ metaphysics (One, Intellect, and Soul) this activity is, broadly speaking, a mental process, a form of thinking or contemplation. Certainly, all ordinary instances of making or doing involve external objects that function as their aim or condition. In fact, even thinking or knowing, as long as the object of thought is considered external to the mind of the thinker, indicate a similar limit to self-sufficiency. Thus, Plotinus’ claim that there exists a form of thinking that is absolute in the sense outlined above enables him to use the criterion of self-sufficiency in order to set up a hierarchical contrast between contemplation and action and affirm the superiority of the former over the latter. One could assume then that Plotinus would pursue, in line with the teaching of the various Gnostic sects active during his time, an ‘anti-creative’ stance, claiming generally that creation and contemplation are radically opposed in some way, or that every form of creative or productive endeavour should be attributed to some inferior entity and its inappropriate or misplaced motivations and aims. However, this is not the case. When he discusses in detail the relationship between contemplation and action, Plotinus makes two claims that bring thinking and making much closer than such an assumption would allow. The first claim is that ‘some wisdom makes all the things which have come into being, whether they are products of art or nature’ (V.8[31].5.1–3). The scope of this assertion is quite broad, but in the case of Intellect and Soul, which take over the function of the Platonic divine Craftsman in the creation of the world (see, e.g., ΙΙ.3[52].18.9–18; V.9.[5]3.25–37), the ‘wisdom’ supporting their ‘making’ originates in their internal contemplative activity. The principal function of this claim is to assert, in agreement with the model of the Timaeus, the primacy of the theoretical over the practical. Knowing or thinking comes first, making or acting follows; in order to make or act successfully one has to possess the relevant knowledge; there is no point in making, if one does not know what one is supposed to make. At the same time, however, this claim, again following the Timaeus, functions as a broad defence of all kinds of creative capacities or projects against the Gnostic assertion that every form of making is always ontologically tainted by the inferior conditions of its origins. If ‘wisdom makes all things which have come into being’, and especially the material world as a whole, then, there is nothing wrong in principle with making, at least insofar as its origins are concerned; creation is not a foolish or misdirected gesture occasioned by a cognitive deficit or the existence of some ignoble need.7 However, thinking and making are not connected only at the origins of a creative project. They are also related in the order of ends, since, according to the second claim, ‘all things aim at contemplation and look to this goal, not only rational but also non-rational animals and nature in plants and the earth which produces them’ (III.8[30].1.3–5; 7.22–23). This is also true in the case of human activity: ‘action is for the sake of contemplation and vision, so that for men of action, too, contemplation is the goal’ (III.8[30].6.1–2). Obviously, such understanding of the connection between contemplation and making stands in stark contrast to the widely shared modern notion of the ‘primacy of the practical’ that values theory only as a necessary condition for the success of practical projects. In the Plotinian context, it seems to subordinate entirely any form of practical activity to theory by refusing to assign to practice any independent function or value. It is not just that one is supposed to make or act only if one possesses the theoretical cognition of the relevant object, but also that one is supposed to make or act in order to make 120

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this object available to theoretical cognition—and not in order to pursue some independent practical interest, like gaining more power, responding to a claim of justice, or creating an object of practical utility or aesthetic pleasure. In typical Plotinian fashion, both these strong claims hover between the normative and the descriptive. One way to clarify their function would be to distinguish between different, more or less successful, instances of the practical. Plotinus elaborates distinctions of this kind, looking both at the origin and the purpose of practical activity. Thus, from the point of view of what different creators have at their disposal prior to or during their creative activity, he distinguishes between two forms of ‘making and action’. The first, in which the creator ‘has nothing in mind beyond what has been made’, is considered a ‘weakened form of contemplation; the second, in which the creator ‘has something prior to this to contemplate which is superior to what has been produced’, is considered a ‘consequence of contemplation’ (III.8[30].4.40–44). From the point of view of a creative project’s purpose, a coordinated distinction can be drawn on the basis of the capacity of an individual for theoretical contemplation. Individuals who, ‘due to weakness of soul’, are ‘unable to grasp adequately the object of their [theoretical] vision’ may be ‘still desirous of seeing it’. Thus, they are carried towards action so that they can see [with their eyes] what they cannot see with their intellect. Whenever they do succeed in producing something, they also want to see it for themselves and others to contemplate and perceive it, whenever their project is realized as far as it can be in action. (III.8[30].4.32–35; 6.1–9) These distinctions make possible a nuanced understanding of the relation between contemplation and creation that can be flexibly deployed in accordance with Plotinus’ different objectives in different contexts. In the context of ordinary natural or human creativity,8 these distinctions underlie, for example, Plotinus’ claim that the philosopher is superior to the musician or the lover, since the philosopher can firmly contemplate beauty in a separate intellectual vision that neither depends nor is being conditioned by any of its empirical manifestations produced by nature or artists (I.3[20].1–3). They also underline his assertion that material objects, precisely because they are made either by nature or by human craftsmen, are ‘obscure and weak imitations’ (IV.3[27].10.17–19) of the relevant intelligible objects, ‘just toys in a way, things of little worth’ (III.8[30].5.6–10). From this perspective, making—the natural ‘making’ of a real horse through procreation, the technological making of a robot horse, the artistic making of the statue of a horse—can be considered an inferior substitute for contemplation. Elsewhere, the same distinctions enable Plotinus, for example, to defend artistic creativity against the Platonic assertion that works of art, in being copies of empirical objects, are merely worthless ‘imitations of imitations’. Exceptionally good artists do not merely copy sensible reality, but work like Pheidias, ‘who did not produce his statue of Zeus according to anything sensible, but grasping what he would be if Zeus wanted to appear before our eyes’. If artists can ‘go back [in contemplation] to the expressed principles from which nature comes’ and, by firmly possessing a vision of beauty, ‘supply whatever is missing’ to their sensible creations with reference to these intelligible models, then their creative work should be treated with the appropriate respect (all quotations in this paragraph are from V.8[31].1.32–41). Plotinus’ position so far can be summarised in the following way. A substance can remain entirely within itself and engage in its own self-sufficient contemplative activity; contemplative access to a prior intelligible object is a necessary condition for successful making; the purpose of successful making is the production of an object of contemplation. This double conditioning of 121

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making, i.e., the fact that the product of making ‘comes from [an object of ] contemplation and is [an object of ] contemplation’ (III.8[30].7.1–2), creates all kinds of problems concerning the categorical status of the relevant objects and subjects, since Plotinus seems to blur the fundamental distinction between the ideal object of contemplation, which, in modern terms, is a mental representation, and the actual product, which, in modern terms, is a real object.9 However, there is a more pressing question: if it is possible for a subject or substance to remain in the superior state of self-sufficient contemplative activity, what is the point of engaging in creative activity? We may call this question ‘Pheidias’ riddle’: ‘For why would anyone go after [or create] the image of what is genuine as their first choice, if he can contemplate what is genuine?’ (III.8[30].4.44–45). But this question is essentially rhetorical (see V.1[10].6.4–8). In the same way that it would be impossible for the divine Craftsman of the Timaeus not to create the universe, Plotinian hypostases, substances and subjects have to engage in their appropriate creative activity (metaphysical, natural, technological) so that reality can unfold and acquire its existing structure and contents. Plotinus translates this requirement into a philosophical claim by asserting that, in addition to its primary internal activity, every substance is also engaged in a secondary or derivative activity that is essentially creative since it produces external objects. The crucial point is that this secondary external activity is a necessary consequence of the primary activity. So, when Plotinus claims that making is a consequence of contemplation, not only does he mean that contemplation is a necessary condition for making, but also that making is a necessary effect of contemplation, or that contemplation is a necessary and sufficient condition for creation (see, e.g., IV.8[6].6.8–9). In this sense, creation should not be understood anymore as a substitute for contemplation. If, as Plotinus claims in V.4[7].2.29–23, the external activity necessarily follows the internal activity in every way, the creative urge is directly and not inversely analogous to the power of contemplation. Plotinus can thus make a quite surprising claim: ‘things that produce are primary, and it is as a result of this that they are primary. That which is primary, then, must at the same time be that which produces’ (V.3[49].10.2–3).10 The precise nature of the relation between the internal-contemplative and the externalcreative activities of the substance is not easily discernible from the relevant textual evidence. Plotinus suggests occasionally that they are not even two distinct activities, but rather a single activity with a double aspect (II.9[33].8.22–23). On the one hand, the external activity is regarded as an imitation or image of the internal one, in the same way in which the created object is an image of the object of contemplation (e.g., IV.5 [29].7, 16–18; V.2[11].1.14–15) and it is constantly dependent on the internal one, even if externally directed (e.g., VI.2[43].22, 33–35). On the other hand, in defence of the self-sufficiency of the internal activity, Plotinus claims that the existence of the external activity does not affect in any way the internal activity itself. Even when its activity is directed to external objects, the substance, like the Platonic Craftsman after his creative intervention, enjoys the ‘stillness’ of being ‘free from occupation with other things’ (V.3[49].7.14–15; V.4[7].2. 21), i.e., it remains absorbed in its own self-directed contemplative activity without any awareness of the external effects of this activity (see Emilsson 2007: 30–48). Regardless of the particular way in which the relation between the two activities is construed, it is evident that the conditions Plotinus imposes on it are not compatible with the ‘technological’ model of the Timaeus. There cannot be an intentional and deliberate effort to employ the appropriate means in order to achieve the specified purpose, if the contemplative activity that precedes the creative intervention is entirely self-directed, and hence unaware of any external purpose. This is clearly the reason why Plotinus consistently illustrates the external creative activity with metaphors of natural processes—overflow, emanation or propagation—and not with examples taken from ordinary crafts (e.g., V.1[10].6.29–39; 122

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V.2[11].1.7–10; V.4[7].2.31–33). It is important to note that what is at stake here is not just the replacement of a model of creation as a deliberate teleological effort with one based on an intuitive or spontaneous, genius-like, guidance of the creative work. Beyond that, Plotinus suggests that there is a real, categorical continuity between contemplation and creation. Contemplation, whether conceptual or intuitive, deliberate or spontaneous, does not merely guide creation as its cognitive pre-condition. Contemplation issues in creation; it is, so to speak, directly ontologically effective, in the same way, to use Plotinus’ favourite example, in which the internal heat of fire does not merely represent the object as warm but actually makes the object warm. Another aspect of this model of creative activity is that its origins cannot be attributed to a state of need or deficiency to be addressed through the relevant action. An entirely selfsufficient creator does not need anything; in line with Plotinus’ physical metaphors, her creative activity can only be considered as a manifestation of a plenitude of power, or a state of perfection, the ‘superabundance’ that characterises her state when she engages in her internal contemplative activity (V.2[11].1.7–9; V.1[10].6.38; V.4[7].1.28–29). Given this imagery, Plotinus runs the risk of construing the external creative activity both as entirely unmotivated and as effectively blind: in terms of his own metaphors, one could notice that, say, a superabundance of heat could easily lead, without it being anyone’s fault, to a destructive explosion. How are we to describe the nature of this external activity if it is not purposive, guided deliberately by some intention or motivation? The Plotinian response is that through their external activity ‘all beings, as long as they persist, necessarily produce from their own substances, in dependence of their present power, a surrounding reality directed to what is outside them, a kind of image of the archetypes from which it was produced’ (V.1[10].6.31–34). Since these beings are what they are by engaging in their internal contemplation of these archetypes, their external creative activity can be equally considered as an expression of a tendency that ‘it is common to everything which exists to bring other things to a state of assimilation [or likeness] to themselves’ (IV.3[27].10.35–36). This claim evidently points back to the motivation of the divine Craftsman of the Timaeus: since he was good, he wanted to make everything as similar to himself as possible, as good as possible. We saw in this section that Plotinus retained some basic aspects of Plato’s way of understanding the relation between thinking and making. However, we also saw how he developed a much more complex account of this relation which goes far beyond the idea of contemplation as a cognitive pre-condition of purposive creative activity.

3 Thinking as self-making Let us return to philosophy and its contemplative practices. Plotinus shares the widely held view that philosophy comprises many different kinds or sub-disciplines that are concerned with different objects and employ different methods or ways of thinking about these objects. There is, for instance, natural philosophy, that ‘theorizes about nature’, or ethics, that ‘theorizes’ about moral traits and the practices that shape them or result from them (I.3[20].6.1–8). In theorizing about these objects, philosophy inevitably employs all kinds of ordinary forms of thinking, e.g., it uses logic, ‘the so-called logical technique regarding premises and syllogisms’ (I.3[20].4.19), or ‘calculative reasoning concerning particular states and actions’ (I.3[20].6.9–10), and unavoidably relies on the evidence of sensible experience. However, Plotinus claims that there is a distinct form of thinking, ‘dialectic’, which is ‘the more honourable part of philosophy’ (I.3[20].6.1). The importance of this ‘part’ is both instrumental—since it provides the principles that guide philosophical thought in all its different projects (I.3[20].6.5)—and intrinsic—since it 123

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‘should not be thought to be a tool of philosophy’ (I.3[20].5.10–11), but rather the essential core of philosophical practice. How is this form of thinking possible? In order to locate philosophy within the metaphysical map of reality, Plotinus construes it metaphorically as a journey with distinct stages. The philosophical journey starts when the soul withdraws its attention from the external physical reality accessible through sensible experience and turns inward to its own content that is prior to its encounter with material reality. This inward turn is simultaneously an ascent towards the intelligible reality Plotinus associates with the hypostasis Intellect (see, e.g., III.8[30].8.1–5). But reaching the level of Intellect does not conclude the journey: ‘those who have already arrived in the intelligible world […] must necessarily travel until they arrive at the furthest place, which is indeed “the end of the journey”, when someone would be at the pinnacle of the intelligible world’ (I.3[20].1.13–19). Initially, then, philosophical thinking is essentially a form of mental purification that enables the re-orientation of the philosopher’s soul toward intelligible reality (cf. V.1[10].1.22–29). In its second stage, when the philosopher reaches the level of Intellect and practices dialectic, philosophical thinking is essentially a re-enactment of Intellect’s contemplative activity. At the end, and by engaging in Intellect’s internal contemplative activity, the philosopher is supposed to ‘see’ what Intellect ‘sees’ (see, e.g., I.3[20].3.10–19). What does Intellect see then? To respond, we would need to examine in more detail its internal activity.11 At the outset, Plotinus clearly conceives of this activity as essentially mental, as a form of thinking or cognition. Hence, it shares the fundamental features of all forms of thinking, three of which are particularly relevant in this context. First, this activity involves (both presupposes and entails, as we shall see) a distinction between the subject and object of thought that can be perhaps qualified in a variety of ways, but cannot be entirely abolished: as Plotinus puts it, anyone who tries to understand the nature of thought ‘must realize that all thinking originates from something and is of something’ (VI.7[38].40.5–6; V.1[10].4.31–35; V.3[49].10.45–46). Second, given Plotinus’ understanding of contemplation as a kind of vision, the subject of thought must be somehow aware of the object and be conscious of itself and its activity (see, e.g., V.3[49]13.12–14). As Plotinus notes, this awareness may not be explicit at any given moment and may not be included in ordinary empirical consciousness (see, e.g., I.4[46].9.17–31); however, a contemplative activity without ‘a sort of consciousness or a substitute for it’ (Lloyd 1979: 265; see also Hunt 1981: 73) would seem impossible. Finally, the object of thought must be a whole with differentiated parts characterised by internal complexity and plurality, a structure of similarities and differences to be grasped by thought: ‘So, the subject of thought must be different and grasp that which is different and that which is thought has to be understood as being variegated. Otherwise, there will not be intellection of it’ (V.3[49].10.41–42). In effect, the similarities between the contemplative activity of Intellect as presented by Plotinus and the forms of thinking with which we are familiar in our ordinary experience do not extend beyond the level of this broad structure. Summing up some of the most striking differences, Intellect’s thinking activity is neither conceptual nor discursive: it does not employ abstract or universal symbolic representations corresponding to general linguistic terms and it is not articulated with the help of successive inferences between statements; it is not based on reasons or justifications. It may not even be propositional, in the sense that it does not capture the complexity of its object with the help of the familiar structure of subject-predicate propositions.12 Taken together, these characteristics imply a fully intuitive and holistic mode of thought wherein the thinking of the object occurs directly, immediately, and fully. It is a form of 124

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thought that is ‘at-once-of-a-whole’ (Emilsson 2007: 180), since it does not first have to grasp some part of the object (or even the whole) and then move, through judgements or inferences, to some other part (or eventually the whole), but rather grasps simultaneously the whole with all its parts (see, e.g., V.9[5].7.10–12; V.8[31].5.5–9). In this way, and in contrast to ordinary modes of thought and cognition, the whole determines the parts as much as the parts determine the whole. The distinction between the two loses its epistemological or ontological significance and is reduced to a distinction between background and foreground: ‘each [part] always comes from the whole and each [part] is at once also the whole. For it looks like a part, but sharp sight sees into it as whole’ (V.8[31].4.23–25; III.2[47].1.27–36; VI.2[43].20.16–28). From another point of view, if the object can be thought ‘at-once-as-a-whole’, if one does not have to proceed by ‘dropping some things and picking up others’ (V.1[10].4.19), thinking or cognition is not experienced as a search, motivated by ignorance and marked by desire and effort to overcome any obstacles that stand in the way of grasping the object. Rather, the object of thought offers no resistance and Intellect’s contemplative activity consists in the continuous, full, and secure presence of the object of thought to the thinking subject (see, e.g., V.8[31].4.28–36; cf. IV.4[28].17.1–8). However, the most radical implications of Plotinus’ position become apparent when we take into account that this form of intuitive thinking does not employ ‘special’ mental representations (i.e., the singular representation of the whole in its full complexity) in order to think its objects, but is supposed to take as its objects directly the real things themselves without the mediation of a representation or image of them. Plotinus is aware that in other forms of thought one should distinguish between the mental representation itself, the object as represented by the representation, and the object in itself (all these being in different senses objects of thought),13 but, in the case of Intellect’s contemplative activity, he claims that these distinctions should be abandoned, so that each real object is thought directly, i.e., is in itself its own perfectly transparent mental representation, an ‘image not painted but real’ (V.8[31].5.23–24) that ‘what it says is what it is’ (V.5[32].5.26; V.5[32].1.37–41). But if every object of thought qua representation refers to itself qua real object, then the objects of Intellect’s contemplative activity are fully internal to it and have no reference to an external reality—a conclusion to be expected given the fully self-directed nature of the internal activity of the substance discussed in Section 2. In fact, Plotinus goes even further in this direction and claims that each object of Intellect’s thought is not only both a real object and its thought, but also a subject of thought, an intellect in its own right; in this sense, it is not merely internal to Intellect, but also an active part of Intellect as a whole (see, e.g., V.9[5].8.1–7). One way to make sense of these Plotinian claims would be to invoke a strong version of idealism. In the circumstances of Intellect’s internal activity, thinking and being ‘coexist simultaneously and do not abandon each other, but this one thing is nevertheless two: Intellect and Being, thinking and what is being thought—Intellect, insofar as it is thinking, Being insofar as it is what is being thought’ (V.1[10].4.30–33). However, if this thing which is ‘nevertheless two’ (and actually many more, given the complexity and plurality of the object of thought) is to be one (that is, think or know itself as one), the difference between what does the thinking and what is being thought should not be a matter of two distinct wholes or two distinct parts within a whole. Rather ‘the whole [must be] comprised of parts that are, in a way, of the same kind, so that the part that sees does not differ at all from the part that is seen. For in this way the part of itself that is seeing that which is identical with it sees itself—since that which sees does not differ from that which is seen’ (V.3[49].5.3–7). In this way, the claim that the subject and object of thought must be distinct is qualified by the assertion that they must nevertheless be identical, while the whole/part structure that initially captured the complexity and plurality of the object 125

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of thought refers now to both: the whole is that of a subject/object and every part reflects this totality by being also a subject/object. Plotinus’ construal of Intellect’s contemplative activity may be considered an attempt to defend the existence of a form of thinking or knowledge that is necessarily veridical or certain. Plotinus was aware of the sceptical arguments pointing out that the use of conceptual or perceptual mental representations in order to gain access to the object of thought (see, e.g., V.5[32].1.12–19; V.9[5].5.16–19), as well as the need to articulate thought in discursive lines of reasoning inferentially connecting distinct statements (see, e.g., V.5[32].1.7–8), were sources of potential error and undermined in principle the claim for the existence of a fully actualised kind of thought or cognition characterized by guaranteed veracity or certainty. Both these features of ordinary cognition are related to the fact that the object of thought is external to the subject and not securely possessed by it: ‘if intellection is to be of that which is outside it, it will be deficient’ (V.3[49].13.16–17). By making the objects of Intellect’s contemplative activity internal to it and by suggesting a new understanding of the whole/part structure of the object of thought, Plotinus eliminates in this context the need for the use of mental representations and discursive reasoning. At the same time, he effectively defines this fully actualised kind of thought or cognition that provides the norm for every other kind of thought or cognition as a form of self-thought or self-cognition: ‘in general, thinking seems to be a self-awareness of the whole when many parts come together in the identical thing, that is, whenever something thinks itself, which is actually thinking in the principal sense’ (V.3[49].13.13–15; V.3[49].10.8–37).14 However, for our discussion, the most important implication of the internalisation of the object of thought and the assertion of its identity with the subject is that Intellect’s activity cannot be conceived as the contemplation of a pre-existing or given reality. Since the object of thought cannot and should not be supplied externally, Intellect has to create it in order to contemplate it, or rather has to create it while/by contemplating it. This creative aspect of Intellect’s activity is evident in a number of passages, where Plotinus claims, for instance, that the greatness of Intellect’s wisdom can be measured by the fact that ‘it has with itself and has made all the Beings’ (V.8[31].4.46), or that ‘Intellect, being real, thinks Beings and causes them to exist’ (V.9[5].5.13). However, this kind of making clearly goes beyond any understanding of creation along the lines established by Plato’s Timaeus, since it concerns the making of the intelligible model on which any further creative project is supposed to depend. Moreover, given the identity between thinking and being, it is unclear in what sense Intellect can be prior to the object of its thought in order to make it. As Plotinus asserts in a perfectly balanced formulation, ‘the totality consists of all Intellect and all Being—Intellect, insofar as it thinks, making Being come to exist, and Being, by its being thought, giving to Intellect its thinking, which is its existence’ (V.1[10].4.26–28). We have, thus, good reason to assign contrary relations of priority between the two poles of Intellect’s activity: the mind must be prior to the object in order to create it; the object must be prior to the mind in order for the mind to think it. We also have good reason to doubt these assignments: if the mind were prior to the object, what is the point of calling the latter real being? If the object were prior to the mind, was there a stage when the mind was not thinking? And finally, we have the overall assertion of a complete identity between thinking and being, which renders such assignments useless. One conclusion suggested by this situation is that, if there is any making going on in Intellect’s activity, this cannot be the making of a product by a creator as in the Timaeus, but rather the self-making of Intellect as a whole. In contemplating the object, and thus bringing it into being, Intellect thinks itself and thus constitutes itself; in being contemplated by the subject, and thus bringing it into being, Intellect is thought by itself 126

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and thus constitutes itself. In this activity of self-thinking, subject, object, and activity are identical, and they come together in a single fully realised actuality of self-constitution: All will be simultaneously one; Intellect, intellection, and intelligible. If, then, [the Intellect’s] intellection is that which is intelligible, and the intelligible is it, it will, therefore, be thinking itself, for it will think by its intellection, which it is, and it will think that which is intelligible, which it is. In both ways, therefore, it will think itself; because it is intellection and because it is that which is intelligible—that which it thinks by the intellection—which is what it itself is. (V. 3[49].5.43–49; V. 9[5].8.8–22) In view of passages like the above, one may ask why, given the asserted identity between the two, Plotinus insists on distinguishing between subject and object of thought, and why, given the fact that Intellect’s activity is an atemporal actuality in which the object is always already fully present in the subject and there is no change of any kind, he introduces the vocabulary of making. On the one hand, the distinction between subject and object is for Plotinus an ontologically constitutive feature of thought; the self-constitution of Intellect is the ‘event’ that introduces, metaphysically speaking, difference and plurality into reality.15 On the other hand, the need to establish relations of priority between the different aspects of Intellect’s selfconstitutive activity and to employ a vocabulary of creation in order to describe its contemplative activity may be attributed either to the limitations of our ordinary discursive modes of thought that cannot grasp the actuality of Intellect (see, e.g., V.9[5].8.19–22), or more fundamentally, to our temporal existence which in any case underlies our conceptual limitations (see, e.g., III.7[45].3.11–24). However, even if we are dealing with metaphors, the philosophical exigencies behind their choice and their limitations (e.g., that a metaphorical understanding of contemplation as vision presupposes in Plotinus’ account a metaphorical understanding of contemplation as the making of the object) are quite significant. To recap: dialectic, the form of thinking that characterises philosophy, is a re-enactment of Intellect’s contemplative activity. Intellect contemplates reality as a whole, every single real being in its interconnection with everything else. However, these objects turn out to be internal to Intellect, so when it thinks them it effectively thinks itself, its intellection is selfintellection. Since Intellect and its object are identical as different aspects of the same activity, Intellect brings itself into existence by thinking itself and so its self-intellection is also its selfconstitution. It would seem then, to return to the question raised at the beginning of the section, that, when it engages in its proper contemplative activity (as it always does), Intellect ‘sees’ only itself (even if it contains the whole of the reality; V.3[49].11.20), it remains absorbed in a fully self-sufficient and self-directed activity that has no external conditions or references of any kind. There is something rather disturbing here: could the very activity that safeguards and provides the norm for the meaning or intelligibility of our experience be in itself a meaningless activity of a self-absorbed thinker?

4 Conditions of self-making In the previous section, I examined Intellect’s contemplative activity and I stressed, following Plotinus, its self-directed and self-sufficient character. However, if we look at the larger metaphysical picture Plotinus draws, Intellect falls short of absolute self-sufficiency in a double manner. First, rather surprisingly, because in order to be what it is supposed to be it needs itself:

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Now that which is completely simple and self-sufficient is really in need of nothing. That which is self-sufficient in a secondary sense, needing itself, needs this for thinking itself. And that which is deficient in regard to itself has produced self-sufficiency in the whole with an adequacy arising from all the parts, being present to itself and inclining towards itself, for self-awareness is a perception of something that is many. (V.3[49].13.17–23; see also VI.9[9].6.18–19) This passage indicates that Intellect’s internal activity, presented typically by Plotinus as a full atemporal actuality that aims at nothing and involves no change (see, e.g., V.8[31].4), is nevertheless punctuated, at least conceptually, by moments of need and achievement like every ordinary practical project: ‘knowledge [or thinking of every kind] is a certain type of longing and in a way a discovery of what has been sought’ (V.3[49].10.50–51; see also III.8[30].11.24–25). Intellect, as the subjective or objective half of itself, needs its other half in order to think itself, and thus ‘make’ its self-sufficiency, which is not metaphysically given. As Plotinus puts it later in V.3[49].13, ‘even if [Intellect] says only this, “I am Being”, it says it as one discovering something’ (25–26), i.e., as a ‘fact’ about itself that has to be ascertained after it has occurred or has been established—even if in this case the pronouncement of the claim is in a sense equivalent with the occurrence and the establishment of the fact. The second sense in which Intellect is not self-sufficient is more fundamental. As a hypostatic product of the external creative activity of the One, Intellect has a cause or principle prior and external to it (see, e.g., VI.7[38].16.24–32), and it is indeed an image of its cause (V.1[10].5.5–6; 7.1; V.2[11].1.16); since it does not contain within itself the ultimate principle for its existence, it cannot be fully self-sufficient. A thorough understanding of the nature and activity of Intellect would have thus to consider all the questions raised in the following passage: ‘How, then, does Intellect see, and what does it see, and how in general did it get to exist or come to be from the One in such a way that it can see?’ (V.1[10].6.1). In the previous section, I addressed the first two questions from the point of view of Intellect’s internal activity: it sees itself as containing everything by ‘making’ itself and its objects through its activity of seeing. In this section, I turn to the third question, pertaining to Intellect’s genesis, from an external point of view, i.e., in an attempt to identify the conditions that determine Intellect’s activity. This topic is undoubtedly one of the most difficult and obscure aspects of Plotinus’ thought; here, without doing full justice to the complexity of the issue, I shall identify and discuss a number of points that are particularly pertinent to the matter at hand.16 A convenient outline of Intellect’s genesis is provided by the following passage: Since [the One] is perfect, due to its neither seeking anything, nor having anything, nor needing anything, it in a way overflows and its superabundance has made something else. That which was generated reverted to it and was filled up and became what it is by looking at it, and this is Intellect. The halting and positioning of it in relation to the One produced Being; its gazing upon the One produced Intellect. Since, then, it halts and positions itself in relation to the One in order that it may see, it becomes Intellect and Being at the same time. (V.2[11].1.8–14) Before its halting and turning toward the One, Intellect in statu nascendi, what we may call PreIntellect (Lloyd 1987) or inchoate Intellect (Emilsson 2007), is not yet an intellect, since it does not have an external or internal object of intellection and cannot think (V.3[49].11.15–16). At this stage, ‘Intellect was never seeing the [One]; rather, it was living relative to it and was 128

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dependent on it’ (VI.7[38].16.15–16); we could consider it as ‘intelligible matter’ (see, e.g., II.4[12].5; III.8[30].11.1–9), an indefinite substratum of potentiality that would be eventually fully actualised through the process of Intellect’s self-constitution. However, this substratum is not inert. From the very beginning, Intellect is constituted as a ‘subject-stance’ (Emilsson 2007: 73), the core of which is affective, namely the feeling of a need and a corresponding desire or longing for the satisfaction of this need. The need felt by Intellect at the initial stage of its existence is not determinate or specific. Rather, it is the vague awareness of its lack of self-sufficiency, that its own good—the objects or conditions that may be necessary for its satisfaction—is external to it and hence must be effortfully sought and contingently secured. That is, since ‘the account of its substantiality does not include the principle of self-satisfaction’, there is always the danger that ‘it might be dissatisfied with itself’ (VI.8[39].13.41–44; see also VI.8[39].9.14–15). The corresponding desire generated by this need may be described in a variety of ways. At the outset it is a desire for the One, which can be understood both in an objective sense, a desire to possess the One as the only external object available (V.4[7].2.24–25), and in a subjective sense, a desire to become (like) the One. The subjective sense may be considered more fundamental in this context. Since for Plotinus the One is to be identified with the Good precisely because, on account of its absolute unity, ‘its good is not an [external] attribute of it; for it is it itself’ (VI.9[9].6.29–30), Intellect’s desire for the Good is essentially a desire for reaching this state of absolute selfsufficiency. At this point we encounter the first of the constitutive tensions that lurk behind ‘the life of ease’ (V.8[31].4.1, echoing the Homeric description of the life of gods) that Intellect will eventually live: if the starting point is a state of lack, the desire for a state of self-sufficiency, i.e., independence from external objects, is translated inevitably into a desire for the possession of (all) objects. A similar tension can be expressed in purely subjective terms: in desiring to be fully itself, that is, to achieve a fully self-sufficient self, Intellect desires to be something else (namely, the One) different to what it actually is (see V.1[10].6.47–48). In the case of ordinary, definite desires, the capacity of desire presupposes the ability to represent and determine the object of desire in thought. In Intellect’s genesis, this relation seems to be reversed, since for Plotinus the origin of the capacity for thought is attributed to the actuality of desire: ‘and this is intellection: motion towards the Good that it desires. For the desire generated the intellection and caused it to exist with itself. For desire for seeing is sight’ (V.6[24].5.9–11). This formulation, together with others that associate desire with the capacity to see before it is actually exercised in seeing something specific,17 suggests that Plotinus considers desire as the first intimation of the relation (the ‘motion’ in the earlier passage) between the internal and the external that will eventually sustain the intentionality of thought in its representational capacity. However, we should note that Plotinus associates this original form of desire for the One or the Good with the notion that Intellect possesses from the very beginning something like a mental image of the One. This image is neither an articulated mental image that corresponds to some form of thought, discursive or intuitive, nor some kind of direct perceptual representation. Rather, it is ‘something like a semblance’ (V.3[49].11.7; V.6[24].5.15), an imaginative conception of the One, presumably vague and clearly making no veridical claims, that nevertheless guides and sustains Intellect’s original indefinite desire for the One.18 The presence and the function of this imaginative ‘semblance’ of the One in the inchoate Intellect should be related to the assertion that Intellect is itself an image or a trace of the One. In this sense, Intellect desires the Good not only because it has some kind of image of it as an object of desire, but ‘by being Good-like, that is, having a likeness in relation to the Good’ (V.6[24].5.13–14); at the same time, it is not only the initial image of the One that is indefinite,

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but Intellect itself (VI.7[38].17.15]. In the context of Plotinus’ metaphysics of the image, real causality and causality by representation cannot always be separated clearly. Returning to the narrative of Intellect’s genesis, we have now reached the point when PreIntellect, having distanced itself sufficiently from the One, halts its centrifugal motion, turns around, and looks at the One. With this ‘looking back’, i.e., Pre-Intellect’s contemplation of its origin, principle and sole object of thought and desire, Pre-Intellect’s ‘sight that is not yet seeing’ (V.3[49].11.5) becomes fully actualised by the simultaneous determination of a subject of seeing (Intellect) and an object of seeing (Being) which, as we saw in the previous section, are both distinct and identical aspects of the common actuality of thought and reality (see III.8[30].11.1–9; VI.7[38].17.15–26). However, in this context, the contemplative activity of Intellect can no longer be considered entirely self-sufficient or self-directed. Plotinus insists that it is Intellect that generates its own objects of thought through its activity of self-constitution (e.g., V.1[10].7.13–14). But this claim must now be qualified by the recognition of the role played by the One as an external object of Intellect’s contemplation: ‘Intellect has to look to the One, so that it can be Intellect’ (V.1[10].6.47–48), since ‘for the sight of Intellect it is the Good which completes it’ (III.8[30].11.8). Plotinus’ response to this situation is both to identify the dual character of the factors that shape Intellect’s formation (e.g., ‘for Intellect, by means of itself, also defines its own existence by the power that comes from the One’, V.1[10].7.13–14; see also 5.17–18; VI.7[38].15.14–18) and to underline that the different descriptions that can be offered from different points of view refer to the same activity (e.g., ‘for looking towards the Good, [Intellect] thinks itself’; V.6[24].5.17). One thing that is clear in this respect is that, if we consider Intellect’s contemplative activity as an attempt to possess the object of its desire, the terms of this possession are defined by its own nature: the One can be possessed by Intellect only as an object of thought, under the conditions constitutive of thought. In this sense, even if the One is absolutely simple, Intellect ‘wanting to attain it in its simplicity, ends up always grasping something else pluralized in itself’ (V.3[11].11.3–4) in accordance with the general exigencies of thought. From one point of view, this indicates the creative power of Intellect: even if the objects of its contemplation were ‘obtained when it contemplated the nature of the Good, they came to it, not as they were there [i.e., in the Good], but as Intellect itself came to possess them’ and so ‘this Intellect is what produced these things from that Good’ (VI.7[38].15.12–6). However, from another point of view, this indicates another constitutive tension of Intellect: even if the internal objects of the contemplative activity of Intellect are present to it exactly as they are without any mediation or distortion, Intellect can never adequately grasp the sole external object of its desire and thought. Whether we describe Intellect’s constitutive desire subjectively, as a desire to be a subject like the One, or objectively, as a desire to possess the One as an object of thought, the immense creative power of Intellect is grounded effectively on its inability to satisfy this desire. At the end of the previous section, I raised a question concerning the external condition or reference of Intellect’s contemplative activity, which, for Plotinus, provides the norm for every other kind of thinking and especially philosophical thought. The question was motivated by Plotinus’ construal of this form of thought as an entirely self-sufficient and self-directed activity in which a subject is self-constituted by generating internally the objects of its thought that are identical to itself. This section helped draw a more intricate picture. Not only is there a prior metaphysical principle that conditions Intellect’s genesis and activity, but also a desire for an external object or another subjective state seems to be a precondition of thought, and so thought becomes involved in a project for its satisfaction. How can we situate philosophical thinking and the philosopher in this context?

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5 The making of the philosopher For Plotinus, philosophical practice leads obviously to a contemplative form of life, but as the discussion has shown so far, there is nothing in his metaphysics that could sustain a sharp evaluative contrast between the contemplative and the active life. Plotinus’ sweeping claim that every form of activity originates in and aims at contemplation may indeed be considered an attempt to defend a higher value for the contemplative life. However, at the same time it has two implications that go beyond such a simple hierarchical ordering. First, it allows for the possibility of valuable creative projects guided by contemplative access to intelligible models, as we saw in Plotinus’ defence of art against the charges of superficial or misguided imitation. Second, and more importantly, it creates a ‘natural’ relation between thinking and making, via the assumption that every subject of contemplation has the tendency (without even being necessarily aware of the fact) to shape its environment through its creative activity in accordance with the meaning available to it through its contemplative activity. This spontaneous creative overflow, which for every entity except the One is associated with a self-generated abundance resulting from contemplation, is the primary mechanism that sustains the metaphysical unfolding and hanging-together of reality and, in particular, the shaping of the material world in a meaningful or intelligible way. In this respect, if the material world is conceived as the product of a creative project (as in Plato’s Timaeus), any defence of the goodness of the world (as in Plotinus’ polemic against the Gnostics) is ipso facto a defence of the creative stance. It would be, then, difficult to argue that what is appropriate for a divine Craftsman (i.e., creative engagement with matter) is not appropriate for a philosopher. However, as we have already noted, the core of philosophical practice is a form of thinking that reenacts Intellect’s contemplative activity, a vision that sees what Intellect sees. As Plotinus claims in an almost provocative formulation: But we are kings, too, whenever we are in accord with Intellect. […] And, we know ourselves when we learn about other things by such a vision, either through the faculty of knowledge itself, because we learn about other things by means of it, or because we become what we learn, so that one who knows himself is double, one part knowing the nature of the discursive thinking of the soul, the other knowing that which is above this, namely, the part which knows itself according to the Intellect that it has become. Further, in thinking himself again, due to Intellect, it is not as a human being that he does so, but as having become something else completely and dragging himself into the higher region. (V.3[49].4.1–12) There are three points in this passage that are immediately relevant to our discussion. First, philosophical activity never abandons, but is not limited to, discursive modes of thought based on conceptual and inferential articulations. Evidently, this is a claim intensely debated in the history of philosophy, but, at least for Plotinus, philosophical thought aims at and is capable of more intuitive forms of understanding. Second, in philosophical thought and cognition, whatever else may be the object of inquiry or contemplation, one always thinks and knows one’s own self: thinking is primarily self-thinking. There is a variety of ways to understand this claim, e.g., in a purely formal sense, where self-reflexivity is an essential aspect of every form of thinking, or a broader epistemological one, where every inquiry also involves an examination of the subject of inquiry (see IV.3[27].1.11–12). All these senses derive ultimately from two different sources: the full identity of subject and object in Intellect’s contemplative activity and the constitutive desire or interest of Intellect to know itself by contemplating its cause. To the 131

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extent that philosophical thought re-enacts the experience of Intellect, we may expect that the interest in self-knowledge plays a substantive role in philosophical practice too. In fact, as a final point, philosophical activity is not merely concerned with knowledge of the self or selfknowledge, but it involves essentially a transformation of the self or self-transformation. To see what Intellect sees, to think like a philosopher, one has to become ‘something else completely’ to what one ordinarily is. Does this self-transformation define a self-creative project? Even if a philosopher were not engaged in ordinary making of external objects, would one make oneself a philosopher? An answer to this question is encapsulated in one of the most celebrated passages in Plotinus’ works: How, then, can you see the kind of beauty that a good soul has? Go back into yourself and look. If you do not yet see yourself as beautiful, then be like a sculptor who, making a statue that is supposed to be beautiful, removes a part here and polishes a part there so that he makes the latter smooth and the former just right until he has given the statue a beautiful face. In the same way, you should […] not stop ‘working on your statue’ [Phaedrus 252d7] until the divine splendour of virtue shines in you. (I.6[1].9.7–16) This set of instructions clearly seems to be a definition of a creative project particularly appropriate to a philosopher, since it does not involve any external models, media, or objects, but one’s own self. One could obviously be wary that the description of this project is metaphorical and should not be taken seriously. While a real artist, like Pheidias, would literally need to be a real philosopher in order to see by contemplating in the intelligible principles ‘what Zeus would look like if he wanted to make himself visible’ (V.8[31].1.40–41), the real philosopher would merely metaphorically work as an artist on her inner self in order to transform herself, simultaneously as subject and object, in such a way that she will be able to see her intelligible beauty. Nevertheless, the same concern would apply to all philosophical accounts of the activity of Intellect. As Plotinus notes repeatedly (e.g., V.1[10].6.16–22; see, generally, III.5[50].9.24–29), Intellect’s activity is not really in time, so Intellect never really makes or encounters itself or its objects, and, of course, there was never a time that Intellect existed without thinking or a time that it vaguely saw and desired the Good. Admittedly, all these are highly creative metaphors that are supposed to help us grasp and make sense of interconnected aspects of reality in terms that are available to us through our experience. And one could equally well say that these metaphors are indeed associated with creative projects, in that they guide our efforts to transform our experience and ourselves into something real.

Notes 1 A typical contemporary anti-protreptic to philosophy: ‘[C]onsiderations on the metaphysical level and considerations on the quotidian, mundane level are independent of one another; you can’t get from one to the other; the conclusions you come to when doing metaphysical, normative work (if you are one of the very few people in the world who perform it) do not influence or constrain you when you are concluding something about a mundane matter’ (Fish 2003: 396–97). 2 For an overview of the Plotinian philosophical way of life, see Hadot (2002: 146–71) and Cooper (2012: 305–88). 3 For a brief overview of the theme of contemplative life in ancient philosophy, which draws some useful distinctions, see Bénatouïl and Bonazzi (2012). The most famous discussion of active life in its contrast to contemplative life is, of course, Arendt (1998: 7–21).

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Plotinus 4 Quotations of Plotinus follow Henry and Schwyzer (1964–82) and translations follow Gerson (2018), with some modifications. All citations from Plotinus are to these texts. 5 Two detailed recent discussions of the creative practice of the divine Craftsman are Johansen (2004: 69–91) and Broadie (2012: esp. 7–26). See also Sedley (2007), who situates the Timaeus’ account in the context of ancient creationism down to the Stoics, and O’Meara (1993: 70–78) for a brief discussion of Plotinus’ response to the Timaeus conception of creation. 6 I have discussed (in a similar vein) Plotinus’ account of the relation between contemplation and action in Vassilopoulou (2014: 493–96), but the focus there is on artistic creativity. 7 Plotinus’ literal claim should be read in the context of the various Gnostic mythological elaborations of the basic framework of Plato’s Timaeus, according to which it ‘is ‘Wisdom’ or Sophia, the last of the Aeons [intelligible divinities], who disrupts the prevailing order by conceiving and giving birth to the imperfect and foolish Demiurge of the material world’ (Kalligas 2014: 366). Kalligas identifies incisively the core issue of the debate between Plotinus and the Gnostics: an attitude of alienation from the natural and socio-historical world, which rests on the negative valuation of all human capacities to interact practically with it and on the possibility of a purely spiritual salvation from it (2014: 368–70). 8 For Plotinus, natural and artificial instances of making are homogeneous in that they are metaphysically attributed to the same hypostatic activity of the Soul. 9 These issues point directly to the fundamental difference between Plotinian and modern metaphysics. Fundamental modern distinctions (such as that between the subjective and the objective or between representation and reality) are derivative for Plotinus, since for him every entity (apart from the One) is an image of another entity and thus shares in both the orders of the real and the ideal, it exists and represents at the same time. For a discussion of some of these issues, see Hunt (1981). 10 Useful discussions of Plotinus’ doctrine of double activity are to be found in Lloyd (1990: 98–105), Gerson (1994: 23–37), and Emilsson (2007: 22–68). 11 Plotinus discusses Intellect’s contemplative activity in many places. Useful, more or less extensive, treatments can be found in II.9[33].1; V.3[49].5–7; V.5[32].1–2; V.8[31].4–6. 12 For a helpful discussion of these characteristics, see Emilsson (2007: 179–98). For the issue of nonpropositional thought in particular, see the exchange between Lloyd (1979), Sorabji (1983), and Lloyd (1986). 13 I am taking this distinction from Hunt (1981: 75); see also Crystal (1998: 265–69), and Emilsson (2007: 124–27). 14 For a discussion of the sceptical claims and Plotinus’ awareness and response of them, see Crystal (1998: 265–69) and Emilsson (1996: 220–44). Let me note that, in order to complete his task, Plotinus has to neutralize another sceptical claim concerning the possibility of self-thought: if a mind is to think itself, it cannot be as a whole thinking the whole (the distinction between subject and object of thought will disappear) and it cannot be as a part thinking another part (this would not be thought of the whole) (see, e.g., V 3[49].1.9–13). As we saw, Plotinus’ response to this dilemma is a ‘distributed’ model of the whole/part structure of Intellect, in which every part is simultaneously subject and object of thought. 15 I thus generally agree with Emilsson (2007: 157–60): the distinction between subject and object of thought is not a result of our discursive limitations. 16 For a useful collection of the relevant texts with commentary, see Bussanich (1988). Important discussions are to be found in Lloyd (1987), Bussanich (1996: 46–57), Emilsson (2007: 69–23). 17 See, e.g., V.3[49].11.4–5: ‘[Intellect] impelled itself towards [the One] not as Intellect, but as sight that is not yet seeing’ and 11.12–3: ‘prior to [the conversion], [Intellect] was only desire and a sight that is without an impression’. 18 In V.3[49].10.39–47, and in the context of stressing the claim that thinking presupposes plurality, Plotinus changes metaphorical modalities and compares Intellect’s pre-intellectual grasp of the One, which has not yet articulated the appropriate structures of plurality, ‘to a touching and a sort of inexpressible contact without thought’ (42–43). Thus, before Intellect sees, it has to touch and imagine.

References Arendt, H. (1998) The Human Condition, 2nd ed., Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Bénatouïl, T. and Bonazzi, M. (2012) θεωρία and βίος θεωρητικός from the Presocratics to the End of Antiquity: An Overview, in T. Bénatouïl and M. Bonazzi (eds.), Theoria, Praxis and the Contemplative Life after Plato and Aristotle, Leiden and Boston: Brill, 1–16.

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Panayiota Vassilopoulou Broadie, S. (2012) Nature and Divinity in Plato’s Timaeus, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bussanich, J. R. (1988) The One and its Relation to Intellect in Plotinus, Leiden: E. J. Brill. Bussanich, J. R. (1996) Plotinus’ Metaphysics of the One, in L. P. Gerson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Plotinus, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 38–65. Collins, J. H. (2015) Exhortations to Philosophy: The Protreptics of Plato, Isocrates, and Aristotle, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cooper, J. M. (2012) Pursuits of Wisdom: Six Ways of Life in Ancient Philosophy from Socrates to Plotinus, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Crystal, I. (1998) Plotinus on the Structure of Self-Intellection, Phronesis 43: 264–286. Emilsson, E. K. (1996) Cognition and Its Object, in L. P. Gerson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Plotinus, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 217–249. Emilsson, E. K. (2007) Plotinus on Intellect, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Fish, S. (2003) Truth But No Consequences: Why Philosophy Doesn’t Matter, Critical Inquiry 29: 389–417. Gerson, L. P. (1994) Plotinus, London: Routledge. Gerson, L. P. (ed.) (2018) Plotinus: The Enneads, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hadot, P. (1995) Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, Oxford: Blackwell. Hadot, P. (2002) What is Ancient Philosophy? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Henry, P. and H.-R. Schwyzer (eds.) (1964–82) Plotini opera cum Porphyrii Vita Plotini, 3 vols. (editio minor), Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hunt, D. (1981) Contemplation and Hypostatic Procession in Plotinus, Apeiron 15: 71–79. Johansen, T. K. (2004) Plato’s Natural Philosophy: A Study of the Timaeus-Critias, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kalligas, P. (2014) The Enneads of Plotinus: A Commentary, Vol. 1, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Lloyd, A. C. (1979) Non-Discursive Thought: An Enigma of Greek Philosophy, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society New Series 70: 261–274. Lloyd, A. C. (1986) Non-Propositional Thought in Plotinus, Phronesis 31: 258–265. Lloyd, A. C. (1987) Plotinus on the Genesis of Thought and Existence, Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 5: 155–186. Lloyd, A. C. (1990) The Anatomy of Neoplatonism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. O’Meara, D. J. (1993) Plotinus: An Introduction to the Enneads, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Sedley, D. (2007) Creationism and Its Critics in Antiquity, Berkeley: University of California Press. Sorabji, R. (1983) Time, Creation, and the Continuum: Theories in the Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, London: Duckworth. Vassilopoulou, P. (2014) Plotinus’ Aesthetics: In Defence of the Lifelike, in P. Remes and S. SlavevaGriffin (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Neoplatonism, London: Routledge, 484–501.

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10 THINKING’S HISTORY Descartes and the past tense of thought Andrea Gadberry

Saying ‘thinking’ is really not enough, if we wish to think what thinking might be. —Jean-Luc Marion (1999: 97)

1 Introduction This essay asks how Descartes understands thought—not in the pure present of its enunciation (in the instant of the ‘cogito’)—but when it is over and done with. The question I aim to answer here is straightforward: how is the ‘cogito’ (‘I think’) different from the ‘cogitavi’ (‘I thought’)? To rephrase my epigraph, my aim is to ask not ‘what thinking might be’ but what it might have been. Thinking about the thoughts he had once, or even had habitually, fuels the Descartes of the Discourse; there, his contempt for the prejudices he acquired in his youth spurs him to invent a method for reason’s cultivation. Yet this familiar account comes with a twist. As Descartes shakes that unfortunate history and lays the foundation for his method, he carefully excludes the very faculty that enables him to recall those old lessons, namely, memory. Because, for him, remembering does not qualify as a form of thinking, Descartes finds himself in a conceptual pickle. So, too, does this volume: to think about thinking’s history with Descartes means to take on a task that calls upon a cognitive capacity separate from thought itself. To remember, in other words, is not to think. For Descartes, thoughts that happened in the past therefore occupy an uneasy place in a schema of thought that is otherwise capacious, often to the point of generosity. When Descartes defines thought in the Principia, he welcomes an astonishing range of categories. Thinking, we learn, includes ‘everything which we are aware of as happening within us [consciis in nobis fiunt] … not merely … understanding [intelligere], willing [velle], and imagining [imaginare], but also … sensory awareness [sentire]’ (AT VIIIA 7, CSM I 195).1 There is little space here, however, for thoughts that took place in the past. Rather, thought seems outright ahistorical, that which has no past at all: it consists exclusively of everything ‘we are aware of’ when it comes to those things that ‘are happening [fiunt]’ in us. We might recall how to walk or to tango in the same way Pavlov’s dog ‘remembers’ to drool, with gratitude towards our obedient fibres and nerves. But remembering how to summon our past ideas, to think about a history of thinking, or to engage in cognitively sophisticated activities—in acts like reading, for instance—requires Descartes to

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fumble towards a supplementary category that can accommodate his insistence on human exceptionalism: ‘intellectual memory’.2 A notoriously fuzzy category, never appearing systematically in his work and instead scattered across Descartes’ correspondence (Joyce 1997), ‘intellectual memory’ is a compromise position that has thwarted scholars who would wish to ‘save Descartes’ (Joyce 1997: 383) from his own enigmatic inconsistency. While ordinary memory operates on a strictly material basis, with repetition producing a ‘disposition’ in the brain that hastens subsequent reactions or later behaviours in imprinted patterns of glandular gyration (cue Pavlov), ‘intellectual memory’ abandons the brain entirely. It is of ‘a wholly different kind’ (AT IV 114, CSMK 233). Allegedly immaterial, productive of entirely other varieties of ‘traces’, intellectual memory lets Descartes have it both ways: in that it is intellectual, this kind of memory is adjacent to thought and indeed relies upon it; in that it is still memory, it does not impel Descartes to swap out syntactical positions once and for all to produce a ‘remembering intellect’ or a ‘memorial thought’. A history of this kind of thinking instead threatens to leave no trace—philosophical or otherwise. In the pages that follow, my aim is not to create clarity where there is none but to take up Descartes’ provocation—that intellectual memory ‘cannot [be] explain[ed] by any illustration drawn from corporeal things without a great deal of qualification’ (AT IV 144, CSMK 233). I want to turn to the problem of ‘expla[nation]’ and ‘qualification’ to propose that we locate in the past tense of Descartes’ thinking precisely a crisis of explanation whose best consolation is to be found in the twin technologies that make a philosophical history of thinking possible: writing and reading. I will show how Descartes’ most intriguing ‘explanation’ of the operation of intellectual memory—even in the face of its apparent difficulty—requires writing to produce and reading to detect a system of material traces adequate to the apparently immaterial marks intellectual memory leaves behind for thought’s history. In this way, coming to terms with thought’s aftermath entails both accommodation and conjecture; for this, a literary philosophical engagement ends up being surprisingly central to the philosopher who deemed poetry and rhetoric particularly ‘sweet’ but not especially central to the rigors of his method (AT VI 6, CSM I 113). For Descartes, thinking about the history of philosophical thinking, revisiting the thoughts of the past, imparts a tense literary history in which the legitimacy of interpretation and the most basic coherence of the subject are simultaneously at stake. From here, my bigger wager is that, for Descartes, the translation of thought (from thinking in the present to thought in the past) tells an imaginative history of thinking that requires a material history, whatever the author’s protests otherwise, if a history of thinking is to be told with any evidence. A history of Cartesian thinking, a consideration of the elusive ‘cogitavi’, then, requires feeble memory’s double supplementation: first, with an additional faculty in ‘intellectual memory’, and, second, with a specific mode of thinking that can shore up the shortcomings of memory by turning to a mode of thinking conversant with material things: that which Descartes calls the imagination. The most audacious version of the claim I will attempt here, then, is this: when he imagines proving that he thought the things in the past he claims to have thought, Descartes is, in spite of himself, a friend to the historical materialist.

2 Thinking, amnesia, and literary history When Descartes first describes the operation of memory (the animalistic kind that is not a form of thinking), he evokes a special system of cerebral pleats: As for memory, I think that the memory of material things depends on the traces [vestiges] which remain in the brain after an image has been imprinted on it [après que 136

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quelque image y a été imprimée]; and that the memory of intellectual things depends on some other traces which remain in the mind itself [quelques autres vestiges, qui demeure en la pensée même]. But the latter are of a wholly different kind from the former, and I cannot explain them by any illustration [exemple] drawn from corporeal things [par aucun exemple tiré des choses corporelles] without a great deal of qualification. The traces in the brain, on the other hand, dispose it to move the soul in the same way as it moved it before, and thus to make it remember something. It is rather as the folds in a piece of paper or cloth make it easier to fold again that way than it would be if it had never been so folded before. (AT IV 114, CSMK 233) Ordinary memorial folds allow for the equally ordinary conditioning common to the other brained animals I have alluded to above. In contrast, this special, immaterial crimping—so crucial to the ‘intellectual things’ we must remember, to a history of all those things we have thought in the past—escapes the logic of the ‘image … imprinted’ and instead marks out a new territory for itself: the inexplicable. Away from ‘image’, ‘imprint’, and ‘exemple’, intellectual memory relies instead upon ‘some other traces’. It is this problem—how to explain the thoughts of the past, the history of thinking—that brings Descartes to position intellectual memory’s failures centrally in an origin story he tells, in part, as a literary history. Beyond any reasonable comparison, demanding ‘a great deal of qualification’, immaterial, intellectual memory cannot be accounted for by the easy metaphorics of paper or fabric subjected to folding and refolding. But this incidental reference to a paper’s creases points towards the ‘qualification’ intellectual memory’s representations nonetheless elicit, a literary history positioned as, and equipped to tell, a history of ideas. Looking first to Descartes’ account of poetic inspiration’s relationship to memory and then turning to a surprising parallel in Spinoza, I argue here that a history of thinking, of thoughts that took place in the past, exposes the radical uncertainty to which thought is vulnerable only when considered in retrospect, an uncertainty which, in turn, renders the subject of thinking vulnerable to an instability so severe as to shatter the ‘ego’ that presides over so many cogitos. For Descartes, an explanation of intellectual memory makes most sense—and supplies the requisite ‘great deal of qualification’—when told as a story of literary production. In this rendering, it is poets who are victim to a crucially illuminating species of forgetting: their apparent absent-mindedness has the twofold effect of producing a half-hearted explanation for the inexplicable stuff of poetic inspiration and of indexing the commonplace lapses in biography that produce persons and their accounts of themselves. Indeed, Descartes writes of a kind of remembering distinct from Pavlovian salivation and, in so doing, links intellectual memory’s shortcomings to literary innovation: If we are to remember something, it is not sufficient that the thing should previously have been before our mind and have left some traces in the brain which give occasion for it to occur in our thought again; it is necessary in addition that we should recognize, when it occurs the second time, that this is happening because it has already been perceived by us earlier. Thus verses often occur to poets which they do not remember ever having read in other authors, but which would not have occurred to them unless they had read them elsewhere [sic saepe Poetis occurrunt quidam versus, quos non meminerunt se apud alios unquam legisse, qui tamen tales iis non occurrerent, nisi alibi eos legissent]. (AT V 220, CSMK 356)

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In his account of intellectual memory’s operation, Descartes elaborates on a truism found elsewhere in his work: thinking must always have an object (AT VII 37, CSM II 26). But in this example, it is forgetting to remember the objects of the past—in this case, ‘verses … read in other authors’—which provides the model for a history of thinking. The clearest ‘example’ of intellectual memory, in other words, emerges in a representation of how thinking’s past influences the present, whether or not its influence is recognized. Far from the ‘instant of enunciation’ of the cogito, here Descartes considers serial ‘occurrences … in our thought’, which only mark themselves as thoughts conceived of more than once because of the powers of recognition. To be sure, corporeal memory can leave traces and ‘folds’ in the brain that make it easier for subsequent recognition; on rainy days, I may leave the house without an umbrella by mistake but not because I fail to recognize the familiarity of the substance falling from the sky. But our intellections, a lived history of thoughts, both leave a different kind of vestige and demand a much harder-won ‘recogni[tion]’ to qualify as a history of thinking. At once a model of learning—a recognition ‘when it occurs the second time’—and an account of what happens when one’s present thinking takes a previous thought as its object—‘it has already been perceived’ or thought ‘earlier’—Descartes’ intellectual memory arrives with a strange surfeit: the most convincing depiction of its import emerges when the thinker’s memory fails. To be sure, failure can be useful; the poet stumbles upon poetic language (or, rather, such language ‘occurs’ to poets) only because he forgets thinking that took place earlier in his personal history. The poet’s novel verses are failures, then, in two ways: first, they are apparently not identical to the verses read in the past and so mark a failure of intellectual memory’s reliability, and, second, they are subject to a still graver trespass, that of present-tense thinking’s imperfect capacity for recognition. When later Descartes names this faculty of recognizing thoughts ‘reflection’, he makes an important distinction, remarking that ‘[b]eing conscious of our thoughts at the time when we are thinking is not the same as remembering them afterwards’ (AT V 221, CSMK 357). The self-conscious neurotic and the archivist are not necessarily one and the same here; thinking is not identical to its history. For Descartes’ poet, having a history of thinking available invites a recognition about memory’s happy mishaps: the spark of poetic invention here seems only to be possible because of other poets, because of the verses a later poet reads and thinks about only to misremember. Poetic verse ‘would not have occurred’ to Descartes’ poets had they not engaged in thinking (in reading) beforehand, but the poet is not a plagiarist by any means. Intellectual memory makes it possible to change literary history, at least, simply by avoiding repetition. Intellectual memory, then, furnishes a mimetic faculty with a twist: in the successful production of verses, intellectual memory’s failure produces inexact imitation. In his confident restriction (the verses ‘would not have occurred’ to the poets without reading), Descartes carves out a history of thinking bestowing a light touch to literary history in particular; poets are not anxious about influence, we might say, because they appear to have forgotten that they were subject to it in the first place. Poetry happens thanks in part to memory’s failures—a ruse that installs ‘nothing’ where a history of reading and intellection instead lies. But Descartes’ curious literary history here does not solve the crisis of explanation that he sets out, however, so much as raise the stakes for poets and non-poets alike. Descartes’ poets do not know where their verses come from, lacking a perfect history of their past thoughts, but poetic forgetting is but the literary version of a fate common to all people—and by extension to every history of thinking—no matter how distinguished one’s literary output. In another instance in which he evokes ‘intellectual memory’, Descartes explains that in addition to the corporeal memory, whose impressions can be explained by these folds in the brain, I believe that there is also in our intellect another sort of memory, 138

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which is altogether spiritual, and is not found in animals. It is this that we mainly use. Moreover, it is a mistake to believe that we remember best what we did when we were young; for then we did countless things which we no longer remember at all. Those we do remember are remembered not only because of the impressions we received when we were young, but mainly because we have done the same things again and renewed the impressions by remembering events over again from time to time. (AT III 143–144, CSMK 151) Here, the poet’s felicitous turn of phrase finds a more ordinary analogue: the simple forgetting of our pasts. Like the poet inventing new verses out of misrecognition of his debt to the past, so, too, might someone not recognize an event in the present which in fact responds to an influence from the past. The things ‘we do remember’ take their place in memory thanks to repetition or to the ‘renew[al of] these impressions by remembering … from time to time’. Intellectual memory, this conscious reflection that permits me to have a history of thinking at all, brings personal and poetic histories together. It also makes sense of the particular challenge intellectual memory provokes, namely, that of an ‘explanation’. Such a burden might otherwise be identified as the particularly challenging explanation of our own lives. As Dennis Sepper writes: the fact is that Descartes wrote very little about memory, and that little is more enigmatic than clarifying. Descartes thus leaves us in more than one sense on the threshold of memory. That threshold is the place where we are most fallible and most human, where we can least think of ourselves as autonomous, self-perceiving, selfcertifying beings because we are bound by a past history. (1996: 295) Where ‘we are most fallible and most human’, as Sepper puts it, is precisely when it comes to the ‘cogitavi’ (I thought)—a translation of the cogito into history that marks thought’s special susceptibility to a past whose recognition is by no means guaranteed. Thinking’s history at once marks its enduring power alongside its remarkable resistance to diagnosis, recognition, and reliability. That a history of our thoughts—even one written down for us to see—could portray an especially tense past is made clear when the poet and the subject of biography merge still more overtly. A few decades later in his Ethics (1677), Spinoza writes a scholium for an entry on the proportion of motion and rest in the human body; there, memory and poetic creation intersect again, to astonishing effect. Without any fealty to the specifically Cartesian challenge of maintaining the apparent immateriality of thought, Spinoza considers biographical bouleversements with an exasperation that matches Descartes’ scorn for the failures of his own education and that duplicates the crisis to be found in thought’s potential for discontinuity: It sometimes happens that a man undergoes such changes that I would not be prepared to say he is the same person. I have heard tell of a certain Spanish poet who was seized with sickness, and although he recovered, he remained so unconscious of his past life that he did not believe that the stories and tragedies he had written were his own. Indeed, he might have been taken for a child in adult form if he had also forgotten his native tongue. And if this seems incredible, what are we to say about babies? A man of advanced years believes their nature to be so different from his own that he could not be persuaded that he had ever been a baby if he did not draw a parallel from other 139

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cases. But I prefer to leave these matters unresolved, so as not to afford material for the superstitious to raise new problems. (Spinoza 2002: 342) Spinoza’s description of the ‘Spanish poet’ tells of a person divorced from his own history, whose incredulity before his past is apparently why ‘he might have been taken for a child’. This is a strange characterization of a child, in a sense, because it reverses the usual formula: where often ‘childishness’ is harnessed as slur to accuse an offender of gullibility or foolish misbelief, here the Spanish poet becomes the Spanish sceptic in a move that seems to swap Cervantes’ hero for Calderón’s.3 That the Spanish poet ‘did not believe that the stories and tragedies he had written were his own [ut fabulas et tragoedias quas fecerat suas non crediderit esse]’, however, seems less extraordinary in light of the fact that no mature man ‘could … be persuaded he had ever been a baby if he did not draw a parallel from other cases [persuaderi non posset se unquam infantem fuisse nisi ex aliis de se conjecturam faceret]’. That is, if there were not babies becoming children becoming adults for me to observe time and time again, I would not believe I had ever been a baby at all. In Spinoza’s materialism, the proof is before our eyes: the text is plain to read, and the utterly ordinary, material act of growing up occurs so frequently it comes to pass for selfevidence. In his tantalizing ‘prefer[ence] to leave these matters unresolved’, Spinoza nonetheless conjures a world in which the exceptional Spanish poet and the ordinary ‘man of advanced years’ doubt, respectively, the things he authored and the fact that others authored him. As intriguing as the biographical gaps in a subject liable to have multiple infancies (or multiple adulthoods) is the unlikely alliance Descartes and Spinoza forge in their common impasse when it comes to memory’s failures to deal with thought’s legacies. In Spinoza’s brutal examples, the amnesiac poet balks before evidence of his own intellectual work, the ordinary sceptic only narrowly believes he, too, was once a child, while the philosopher foregoes a fuller explanation of any of this, fearing ‘superstition’! That poets and non-poets, amnesiacs and nonamnesiacs alike could doubt the entirety of the past leads Spinoza to a particular method of consolation, one he will share with Descartes: conjecture (conjecturam). The parallel we are forced to draw, the guess we make on the basis of ourselves and our judgment, to strengthen the belief in our own pasts points to a much more radical reality: we adults are all, in this model, second persons, and the first person who preceded us was a literally speechless creature whom we cannot remember, whose decisions, proclivities, and thoughts we cannot own as our own. We identify that person as part of ourselves not on an evidentiary investigation into ourselves but on the basis of ‘draw[ing] parallels’ and of belief in that method’s efficacy. Still worse, though Spinoza suspends this concern in his scholium, we often believe the stories we are told of these first persons—even if we occasionally attempt to overthrow or rewrite them. (And this is still to set aside the passions of that very person who preceded us, those attachments Judith Butler has identified as the affective preconditions of a subject’s emergence (1997: 7) In Spinoza’s ordinary person, sceptical of having ever been a child, the question at hand appears to be one of belief as much as or more than of thinking. When we see babies become children becoming tweens and so on, we can conclude from our own judgment—we can guess from ourselves—that we followed a similar route into adulthood. In dutifully, if selectively, reminiscing, we skirt the superstition that we might, like the Spanish poet, be given a second lost past in addition to that which we tame by the work of comparison or ‘conjecture’ (conjecturam). Yet Spinoza also demands we imagine a different case, one of total forgetting followed by disbelief: in this encounter with the past, we don’t draw parallels and are confronted instead with a baffling proof. The poet sees his work, reads it, but does not believe. In this curious formulation, the index of the poet’s confusion is a misrecognition of his own 140

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literary paternity; it is his failure to recognize himself as father, evidently, that nearly renders him liable to be ‘taken for a child in adult form’. The only task for the amnesiac poet is to confront the material proof of his past self; he does not need to see a parade of poets or of children at different developmental stages in order to read the language he wrote in ‘the native tongue’ he still remembers how to speak and read. Whatever his scepticism about his own authorship, Spinoza’s poet will have successfully seized the history of his thoughts as an object in the act of reading. For Spinoza’s baffled poet, poetic inspiration seems no longer to arrive, but setting Spinoza alongside Descartes leaves a commonality that links a history of thinking: the texts upon which they are based. Spinoza’s amnesiac, still a reader, may perhaps write again. Perhaps, like Descartes’ poets, he will not realize in moments of writing that the texts he is remembering, without recognition, are his own.

3 Thought’s vestiges: believing in history Spinoza tells us that our understanding of our own pasts is guesswork. For Descartes, guessing long looked like a specious form of reasoning. Installing the clear and distinct as principles central to the systematic extirpation of half-truths and error, the cogito’s creator works to displace guesswork and install the rigor of method in its stead. The systematic protocols that obviate the need for guessing instead reward the reasoning subject with fewer deliberations (the counterintuitive marker, for Descartes, of greatest freedom (AT VII 57–58, CSM II 40)) and with a special efficacy. Where Spinoza’s subjects draw parallels in bearing witness to child development and his amnesiac poet reads the objects of his past thoughts and remains sceptical that they belong to him, whatever the textual proof, Descartes supplies an ‘explanation’ of sorts that installs a soft superstition—a basic credulity—that also arrives to upend the Spanish poet’s amnesiac fantasy of disavowing his (literary) history. In Descartes’ most telling formulation, his subjects develop a special conjectural talent in learning to read—with scepticism suspended. Doing so permits the act of reading to stand in as proof of immaterial intellectual memory’s existence, but it is also the strange place where Descartes saves the ‘cogitavi’ from total oblivion in signalling the urgency of its material remains in written text. In another of the few instances in which Descartes discusses intellectual memory, he resorts to an analogy that links intellectual memory to the act of reading. When you or I read the letters that make the word ‘rex’, Latin ‘king’, we do not stop to review the word’s spelling, to rehearse the sequence of the letters, or to imagine loosening them from their formation; we simply read: When…on hearing that the word ‘K-I-N-G’ signifies supreme power [audiens vocem R-E-X significare supremam potestatem], I commit this to my memory and then subsequently recall the meaning by means of my memory, it must be the intellectual memory that makes this possible. For there is certainly no relationship between the four letters (K-I-N-G) and their meaning [illud certe fit per memoriam intellectualem, cum nulla sit affinitas inter tres illas literas et earum significationem], which would enable me to derive their meaning. (AT V 150, CSMK 336–37) Of course, Descartes describes something perfectly ordinary: when I see the word ‘king’ in a text, I don’t have to look it up anew because I have committed it to (intellectual) memory. This helps Descartes wrest the capacity for ‘intellectual memory’ from the parties that are not supposed to possess it, that is, infants and animals, and (as I have shown elsewhere [Gadberry 2020]) it lets him set out a programme for faster deduction without sacrificing the principle of 141

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the clear and distinct to so lowly a faculty as that drabber, un-intellectual memory. A mysterious quality of this moment, however, is its portrayal of a language acquisition that seems to assume a prior ability to read. Rather than learning to read after learning to speak, Descartes’ language learner does not hear the sound ‘king’, come to understand its signification, and later learn of the letters composing it. Instead, what Descartes is hearing (audiens) is the part that goes unspoken when I say the word ‘king’, namely, the fact that it can also be notated in writing and that it is made up of these specific component letters rather than some other ones. Here, reading arrives first. In this sensory mix-up, Descartes ‘hear[s] that the word “K-I-N-G” means supreme power’ and then learns what the sequence of written letters signifies (‘K-I-N-G’ means king). A disciple of this unnerving pedagogy must commit the written word’s components to intellectual memory only upon having heard their threat of dissociation. Beginning his explanation of intellectual memory with an impromptu spelling bee permits Descartes to leave letters in an echoing, immaterial sphere. But, centuries before so many cautionary klaxons warning of the hazards of logocentrism, Descartes also implies that, for him, language’s existence is concomitant with its capacity to be written. Speech, which Descartes calls ‘the only sure sign of thought hidden within a body’ (AT V 278, CSMK 366), appears not sure enough to go without written transcription. If ‘the intellectual memory has its own separate impressions, which do not depend in any way on [the] folds [of ordinary memory]’, it seems here that it might also lay claim to an alphabet. After all, Descartes will declare of intellectual memory’s particular pleats, ‘I do not believe the number of folds is necessarily very large’ (AT III 84–85, CSMK 148). Perhaps we can even order them—from A to Z. In portraying intellectual memory’s operation as a mental safeguard staving off verbal dissolution, Descartes hints at the possibility of forgetting how to read and shows once and for all that the technology of greatest use to intellectual memory is precisely that which provides the only hard evidence of intellectual memory’s existence in the first place: writing. In writing, the tedium of recalling letters in their sequence reappears even as intellectual memory prevents the writer or reader from having to pause to ask how each word is spelled or to contemplate just what a letter even is. Intellectual memory saves us from a scepticism so radical that it would mistake individual letters as units of clarity and distinction—or, still further, that it would be dazed by a confusion of letters or markings on a page at each instance of reading. Like Spinoza’s amnesiac poet, Descartes’ reader—and his writer—come perilously close to illiteracy but are remarkably unable to forget how to read and write, even should they lose the ability to identify a text’s author (and even when that absent author happens to be himself!). Intellectual memory, it seems, is an older term that encompasses the reader’s basic ‘poetic faith’ in a language whose rules will be maintained, in a system recorded in writing and perceived by reading. Here, what Descartes asks the reader or writer to let remain in uncertainty is not a hyper-rational impulse to resolve a narrative’s troubles lest he forsake the imagination’s delights; it is, rather, a demand that a primal trust be extended to the text, to the sequence of letters that cohere into significant arrangements: letters, words, syntagma. Those uninitiated in reading and writing—infants—naturally, then, have a vexed relationship to intellectual memory and to the history of their thoughts. In a letter speculating on foetal thinking, Descartes forbids the infant from ‘pure acts of understanding’ like those would ‘require … intellectual memory’: I agree with you that there are two different powers of memory; but I am convinced that in the mind of the infant there have never been any pure acts of understanding, but only confused sensations. Although these confused sensations leave some traces in the brain, which remain there for life, that does not suffice to enable us to remember 142

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them. For that we would have to observe that the sensations which come to us as adults are like those which we had in our mother’s womb; and that in turn would require a certain reflective act of the intellect, or intellectual memory, which was not in use in the womb. (AT V 192–193, CSMK 354) A personal history of the history of one’s thinking is legible only in the inchoate scribblings of ‘confused sensations’. Indeed, they ‘leave some traces in the brain, which remain there for life’. However indelible, these traces will never cohere into letters or words, it seems, unless they strike, as poetic inspiration did above, without recognition of their familiarity or their source. In this, Descartes merely rehearses the distinction he always makes for ordinary memory; as I have mentioned above, this faculty, shared by adults but also infants and animals, relies on a history of repetition impressed corporeally. Like augurs reading the sky, the student of someone else’s history of thinking is left to examine not the history of whatever material folds the anatomy theatre makes visible but that of those markings that leave traces on the page. Though it is ‘a certain reflective act’ of ‘the intellect, or intellectual memory’ that is required to be able to say with confidence ‘I thought’—or ‘I was’—it seems Descartes stumbles his way into a supplementary windfall in an archive whose demand for a certain kind of faith, the kind involved in reading and writing, is left for only the superstitious to consider. Without a written record to accompany it, intellectual memory is a reflective capacity frustrated by an illegible writing and then mocked by its glandular, material analogue. It requires guesswork. Yet its proof is material, with ‘a certain reflective act’ in part masking the centrality of the objects it beholds: a history of my thoughts legible only thanks to its existence in the material world, a history narrated in writing. Descartes’ account of the potential for error in ‘composition’ shows the hazards of such guesswork. In his Regulae, Descartes suggests poor composition could be responsible for the errors we make: ‘We can go wrong only when we ourselves compose the objects of our belief [Nos falli tantum posse dum res quas credimus a nobis ipsis aliquo modo componuntur]’ (AT X 423, CSM I 47). As Marcelo de Araujo asks of this moment, ‘What does it mean … to affirm that we “compose” the “object of our belief”?’ (Araujo 2003: 73) For Descartes, all beliefs are ‘composed’ except those that arrive with self-evidence. As Araujo glosses it, ‘We “compose” the object of our belief in that we usually form a belief through the consideration of other beliefs’ (Araujo 2003: 74). Another way of putting it might be that the thoughts we come to believe in require an encounter with—or a deferral of—the thoughts of our past. When we ‘compose’ an idea, Descartes writes in the Regulae, we do so in three ways: ‘This composition can come about in three ways: through impulse, through conjecture, or through deduction [dicimus compositionem tribus modis fieri posse: nempe per impulsum, per conjecturam, vel per deductionem]’ (AT X 424, CSM I 47). Through ‘impulse’, ‘conjecture’, or ‘deduction’, we can compose new beliefs—where ‘belief’ also entails a confidence in the history of our own thinking.4 Thinking is believing, it turns out, when it is confronted in its past tense. In this, ‘conjecture’ threatens to be as random as its projectile etymology intimates (from con-, with, and jacere, to throw). Like the prophecies of Virgil’s Sybil, the thoughts we have had in the past are vulnerable to the gusts of time—or amnesia—and require labour to be reconstructed. In analogizing intellectual memory with reading, Descartes offers a kind of first draft of Spinoza’s amnesiac whose befuddlement before his own poetic creation is spared the far greater threat of forgetting how to read entirely. And here Descartes’ subject—whose existence is secured in the pure present of thinking—meets its dissolution. In the past tense of thinking, in the history of thinking, I find ‘compositions’ of myself that might be beyond belief. And in this, I see the frailty of the present, so soon to become the past. It is only thanks to intellectual memory that 143

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the markings on parchment, that the ideas and dreams I once had, can be believed to have had anything to do with me. The security Hassan Melehy locates in ‘a syntax, and hence a writing … necessary to link one moment of time to the next, to assure the self-identity of thought over time’ (1997: 131) extends to the identity of the self and is only as strong as the accompanying written record. It is this fragile record of scratches on paper that seems to supply the possibility that I existed, the certainty, at least, that someone thought, that someone was. When Descartes insists that intellectual memory needs to have its own kind of ‘vestiges’, he apparently took the etymology of Latin ‘vestigium’ to heart: a track, a footprint, a trace, a mark.

4 Paradise: the future of thinking’s history I have tried here to examine the problems of ‘explanation’ and ‘qualification’ when it comes to the challenge of thinking’s past tense in Descartes. In revisiting Descartes’ apparent reluctance to explain intellectual memory in fuller detail, I see an implicit (and ambivalent) wish that thinking avail itself of memory’s failures in order to be free to forget at least one thing: namely, that any perceivable history of thought is always also a material one, even for Descartes. A history of thinking can only be told when it is remembered; it is subject to the ‘conjecture’ and ‘composition’ to which all beliefs about past thoughts or reasonable inferences must be submitted. Central to my examination here has been the encounter between present-tense thinking and the unsettling objects it locates in past-tense thought. Thinking’s history, for Descartes, also entails scenes of reading (as in his brief comments earlier), where remembering occurs in letters (that is, literally). While habit produces so many traces that ‘can be formed again long afterwards’ (AT XI 178, CSM I 10) only thanks to glandular imprints and cerebral folds, thoughts in the past, preserved imperfectly by intellectual memory, dramatize a crisis of retrieval. Nonetheless, thoughts in the past seem to owe both their own philosophical representation and the possibility of their recuperation to writing and reading. In bringing together remembering and thinking in this way, I have attempted to show how the history of thinking—the history even of that which, for Descartes, is an immaterial pastime—is inseparable from its material one and its material detritus, even as it is narrated in Descartes’ idealist history. To be sure, Descartes easily imagines an immaterial afterlife in which the ordinary and undignified forms of memory, shared with animals and infants, cede their primacy to ethereal reminiscences of the loftiest of our past thoughts. In a sentimental letter to Huygens, Descartes depicts an afterlife in which everyone is a good-enough archivist: ‘Those who die pass to a sweeter and more tranquil life than ours; I cannot imagine otherwise. We shall go to find them some day, and we shall still remember the past; for we have, in my view, an intellectual memory which is certainly independent of the body’ (AT III 598, CSMK 216). In this sympathetic portrayal of intellectual memory, ‘the past’ seems to collapse animalistic ‘memory’ and straightup history (where the past means, roughly, ‘that which happened’) with the history of thinking: it is thanks to ‘intellectual memory … independent of the body’ that we can hold on not just to certain thoughts we have had in our lives but also to anything that happened at all. In a reversal of Spinoza’s poet—who confronts material evidence of his own past, the workings of his own imagination no less, and cannot believe it to have been his own—Descartes rejects a different, and no less stubborn, counterfactual. He ‘cannot imagine otherwise’ when it comes to the obvious-enough ‘sweeter and more tranquil life’ that succeeds death in a Christian worldview. No less impossible to ‘imagine otherwise’ is a coherence of identity so radical that it extends indefinitely, all the way into a heavenly after-party without end. As if to insist that there must not be any forgetfulness in heaven, Descartes imagines a sociable reunion, complete with nostalgic recollections, overseen by an intellectual memory that accounts for a history of material folds as well as 144

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whatever was or might have been included in any record worth writing. To put it still more simply, for Descartes, there are no amnesiacs in heaven.5 Yet ‘intellectual memory’, freed from the burdens of embodiment, does not seem to bequeath to anyone a complete history of his thoughts even upon arrival at the post-mortem Cartesian reunion. In this posthumous history of thinking, heaven’s consolation is instead to absolve intellectual memory from its essential link to accident. From start to finish—from the incredible fact of having been an infant, prey to so many illformed thoughts incapable of cohering into intellectual memory, to an afterlife in which intellectual memory accounts for a continuity of identity long after the death of the body—intellectual memory compensates for an identity that only feels secure enough, human enough, in the instant of thought’s enunciation. In deploying intellectual memory to take thought itself as an object, Descartes secures a linear sequence that brings past, present, and even future obediently into line. Where Proust would threaten so smooth a timeline in appealing to the power of involuntary memory, that which links madeleine to lost time in Combray, Descartes traces what is for him a more dangerous idea than a place or a snippet of a past that might be surrendered to oblivion or resurrected without warning. Thoughts that are lost, impervious to the will to remember them, to the force of thinking in the present, threaten to render a history of thinking impossible. Intellectual memory, then, names the only faculty adequate to telling a history of philosophical thinking, one that only shores up thinking’s remarkable incapacity to know itself and its past. Vulnerable to error, prone to arbitrariness, immaterial thinking needs an extraordinary number of material props along the way, and, as if to conceal its frailty, intellectual memory arrives in Cartesian heaven with the implication of another notable proscription: a moratorium on counterfactual imaginings. Once again, in the matter of ‘belief’, Spinoza’s amnesiac is most menacing, retroactively, to Descartes’ conciliatory plan for the departed and not only because Spinoza makes clear another dangerous outcome his Spanish poet signifies. When it comes to this figure’s potential salvation, it is impossible to know who would show up to heaven: the inspired Spanish poet or the amnesiac who has stopped believing in his history, even the one on display, in writing, right in front of his nose. Both Spinoza and Descartes require a ‘composition’ that may, at least at some moments depend on guessing. In Spinoza’s words, the ordinary person makes a guess about himself (‘de se conjecturam faceret’) when it comes to his earliest past while for Descartes conjecture is the second of three ways of coming to a new belief: ‘per impulsum, per conjecturam, vel per deductionem’. Where Spinoza’s formulation resembles Descartes’ quite literally, though, is mainly when it comes to speculations about the deep future; Spinoza makes his conjecture ‘de se’—from or about himself, in parallel—while Descartes applies such a technique to the vast consolations of the afterlife: the post mortem mingling he ‘could not imagine otherwise’. The necessary guess, the requisite belief, that saves our sceptic from going back to his ABCs or off to ponder illegible marking on the page whenever he reads seems to come with a compulsion to read into the future. But I have strayed from my point, which has not in fact been to shame the long-dead Descartes for clinging to belief, scepticism on hold, for long enough to mourn or simply to read. For I see Spinoza and Descartes struggling with a problem that a history of thinking must also confront: the burden of making a case for why our thoughts in the past mattered—and why they might continue to do so after their or our expiration. A happy version of the history of thinking emerges in Descartes’ inspired poet who, having cast the verses he read before into oblivion, resuscitates them in new form. Delivering a more menacing possibility, the convalescing Spanish poet seems to threaten us all with the possibility of a death before dying, a discontinuity so radical it is as if we were two people in succession instead of one. Spinoza kindly reduces the threat with the odd consolation that such discontinuity has already taken place: we are already a second person in as much as we take the first person we were utterly on faith. But as Spinoza leaves the amnesiac poet aside, as Descartes turns the page from poets whose intellectual memory both lets 145

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them catch a wisp of inspiration from past poets and forget to cite them, both reach a consensus in making provisions for reading not to be rendered impossible by scepticism or even an Iberian ague. In doing so, two philosophers so radically opposed, not only show an intriguing indifference to the ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry; they also insist together on a record of thinking beholden to a philosophy that was always bound to the conditions of its literariness, to reading and writing—and fits of imagination. A history of thinking would have to be a guess, a conjecture drawn from parallels, about what thinking was and how that matters to what thinking is. But in this, I am convinced that thinking’s past tense need not receive a special historical category, whatever the Cartesian manoeuvre to give ‘intellectual’ memory its special place: the thoughts we have preserved in writing make their influence known as do material events, after all. Descartes’ inability to ‘imagine otherwise’ as he yokes past, present, and future into comfortable alignment confronts a kind of thinking he reserved exclusively for material things: the imagination. For Descartes, imagination is ‘a way of thinking specially suited to material things [such] that whatever is not imaginable seems … unintelligible’ (AT VI 37, CSM I 129).6 In this, Descartes links the unimaginable to the unintelligible, but he might as easily have substituted ‘unbelievable’. In the basic faith required for intellectual memory to function, for the possibility of asserting ‘I thought’, Descartes requires that any imaginable history be beholden to a material one. A philosophical history of thinking, an account of the subject of the ‘cogitavi’ in so many guises, would have to enlist the work of the imagination. This hardly frees it, though, from the material traces and marks of the works of the past, whether or not they come to be recognized. For the Descartes who could not imagine a past or a future without thought’s history, ‘intellectual memory’ provided cover for a history of thinking that did not ask him to reframe his most famous slogan to account for the past. No one would reasonably utter such a formula, a ‘cogitavi ergo eram’, that would trigger the avalanche of uncertainties Descartes and Spinoza alike recognized in their portrayals of so many forgetful poets, of an unfailing literacy that precedes and secures the fragile subject, or of a heaven archiving a history of thinking vulnerable to the twin threats of amnesia and imagination.

Notes 1

2

3 4

5 6

References to Descartes indicate the volume and page number of the standard edition of Descartes’ complete works in Latin or French (1964–76), edited by Adam and Tannery (AT), followed by the corresponding standard English translations (1985, 1991), edited by Cottingham, Stoothoff, and Murdoch and by Cottingham, Stoothoff, Murdoch, and Kenny (CSM and CSMK, respectively). Descartes’ enigmatic references to the category participate in a much longer history of debate on intellectual memory, though Descartes is characteristically silent about his interest in or indebtedness to the tradition. See, for instance, John O’Callaghan’s account of the dispute between Aquinas and Ibn Sina regarding the Aristotelian category of intellectual memory, that which O’Callaghan classifies as ‘memory per accidens’ (O’Callaghan 2017: 466). I refer here, of course, to Cervantes’ Don Quixote and to Calderón’s Baroque masterpiece, La vida es sueño. Deleuze recognized precisely this quandary when he discussed the operation of voluntary memory: ‘Voluntary memory precedes from an actual present to a present that “has been”, to something that was present and is so no longer. The past of voluntary memory is therefore doubly relative: relative to the present that it has been, but also to the present with regard to which it is now past. That is, this memory does not apprehend the past directly; it recomposes it with different presents’ (Deleuze 2000: 57). Recognizing this problem, Joyce notes that ‘without memories, these souls would have no subjective continuity, and without this, perhaps, no personal identity’ (Joyce 1997: 382). On Descartes, the imagination, and its significance for modernity, see Lyons (1999).

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References Araujo, M. (2003) Scepticism, Freedom and Autonomy: A Study of the Moral Foundations of Descartes’ Theory of Knowledge, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Butler, J. (1997) The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Deleuze, G. (2000), Proust and Signs, (trans.) R. Howard, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Descartes, R. (1964–1976) Oeuvres de Descartes, 12 vols., (eds) C. Adam and P. Tannery, Paris: Vrin. Descartes, R. (1985) The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, 2 vols., (eds) J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff, D. Murdoch, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Descartes, R. (1991) The Correspondence, (eds.) J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff, D. Murdoch, and A. Kenny, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gadberry, A. (2020) Cartesian Poetics: The Art of Thinking, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Joyce, R. (1997) Cartesian Memory, Journal of the History of Philosophy 35.3: 375–393. Lyons, J. (1999) Descartes and Modern Imagination, Philosophy and Literature 23.2: 302–312. Marion, J.-L. (1999) Cartesian Questions: Method and Metaphysics, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Melehy, H. (1997) Writing Cogito: Montaigne, Descartes, and the Institution of the Modern Subject, Albany, NY: SUNY Press. O’Callaghan, J. (2017) Thomas Aquinas, in S. Bernecker and K. Michaelian (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophical Memory, London: Routledge, 461–467. Sepper, D. (1996) Descartes’ Imagination: Proportion, Images, and the Activity of Thinking, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Spinoza, B. (2002) Spinoza: Complete Works, (ed.) M. L. Morgan, (trans.) S. Shirley et al., Indianapolis: Hackett.

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11 POLYP-THINKING IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY Lydia Azadpour and Daniel Whistler

Please Sir, what is this? An animal which can be multiplied by cutting, an animal whose young come out of the body as a branch comes from a trunk, finally an animal which is turned inside out like a stocking or glove and which keeps on living, eating and multiplying. Here are the marvels, the wonders which we owe to M. Trembley. —Charles Bonnet, 21 Dec 1742 (Bonnet and Cramer, 1987: 240)

1 Introduction: the polyp—from natural object to epistemic virtue During the eighteenth century, philosophers employed models drawn from the life sciences to explain human rationality. This is a well-documented phenomenon—not just in the case of distinctions between, say, mechanical and organic modes of thought, but also in more determinate instances, such as Kant’s advocation of ‘a system of the epigenesis of pure reason’ (1929: B167–68) which has attracted so much critical attention in recent years (e.g., Malabou 2016; Mensch 2013; Sandford 2013). The present chapter is another contribution to this literature: its goal is to describe a broadly analogous philosophical appropriation of an eighteenthcentury scientific model. Abraham Trembley’s experiments on some ‘little aquatic beings’ (Bonnet and Trembley, 1987: 191) found in a ditch near The Hague, in June 1740, are also well-documented, as too is the metaphysical crisis they occasioned among philosophers of the day. Trembley’s dissections, inversions and grafts of freshwater polyps (Hydra vulgaris) acted as a primal scene for many controversies in the life sciences over the next fifty years; however, in the present essay, we will argue that this impact in fact extends much further—it extends to the way philosophers understood their own intellectual practices. The anomalous properties that Trembley ascribes to the polyp came to be transposed analogically to promote or proscribe forms of thinking. We are going to suggest, therefore, that the figure of the polyp is put to (at least) three kinds of use in philosophical texts from 1740 to the 1790s: 1.

as an anomalous object in nature, demanding attention owing to its specific, if far-reaching scientific, metaphysical and theological implications;

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2. 3.

as a template for the broader workings of the natural world—that is, as a heuristic for better describing natural structures and processes; as an epistemic virtue (or vice) with respect to both thinking in general and philosophical practice in particular.

After a few orienting remarks in the next section on the familiar first philosophical use of the polyp as anomalous object, we then focus on the second and, particularly, the third uses. That is, we are not primarily concerned with scientific debates or even their philosophical impact; nor are we concerned with specifying the causes that led to the freshwater polyp (rather than any of the other anomalous natural objects documented at the time) coming to dominate the philosophical imaginary of the eighteenth century. Instead, the fact that, from the mid- to lateeighteenth century, polyps are often present in philosophical texts is our starting point—and from this point of departure we chart their effects on models of thinking. To accomplish this task, we undertake three specific case studies of polyp-thinking in Denis Diderot, Charles Bonnet and C. F. Kielmeyer. We do so to delimit those moments in the eighteenth century where the figure of the polyp became a model (however partial) for thinking. This will further allow us to identify similarities and differences between uses of the polyp across philosophical traditions, and, to this end, we argue in conclusion that, despite the huge diversity that holds across the three case studies, each of these philosophers exhibits a common interest in naturalising the thinking process.

2 ‘Muck worm philosophers’: thinking after Trembley1 To begin to make sense of the ways in which thinking was ascribed polypic properties in the eighteenth century, some initial remarks are necessary on precisely what these properties were held to be. In late 1740, on William Bentinck’s Sorgvliet estate outside The Hague, Trembley was unsure whether the ‘small aquatic beings’ he had collected were plants or animals.2 The problem was that, while this species of freshwater polyp resembled a plant in colour and shape, as well as in its seeming immobility, it did still sometimes move and feed like an animal (see Trembley 1986: 9–11). As Trembley confesses to Bonnet in early 1741, ‘I hardly know if I should call plant or animal the object which occupies me most at present’ (Bonnet and Trembley 1987: 191). And it was to resolve this perplexity that he began dissecting polyps both longitudinally and transversally (as well as inverting them and grafting one polyp onto another). He writes in his Mémoires, ‘The experiments which are of special concern here … consist of cutting the little animals transversely and lengthwise, either in half or into a number of parts. The result of these experiments is that each part develops into a perfect animal’ (1986: 3).3 That is, through these experiments, Trembley was able to observe and record a species of ‘reproduction by which many parts of the same polyp each becomes a complete animal’ (1986: 4). The mutilated parts of the polyp always regenerated once more into new individuals—as Bonnet was to put it a few years later, mutilated polyps ‘form as many new persons, as many new Is, as develop new individual wholes’ (2002: 83). Indeed, Trembley even managed to cut the same polyp material into fifty parts, out of which fifty healthy, distinct polyps grew (1986: 146). Even when he afterwards observed his polyps reproducing naturally, they still did so unlike any other animal yet described in natural history: they were, he writes, ‘all mothers and multiplied without mating’—that is, ‘their natural manner’ of generation is asexual and plant-like, ‘multiplying by shoots’ (1986: 114, 117). He concludes, ‘Polyps again constitute an exception to an allegedly universal rule, that there is no [animal] reproduction without copulation’ (1986: 117). 149

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It was this series of experiments that caught the imagination of the scientific community, of philosophers and even of the public at large. By the end of 1741, Parisian salons apparently spoke of little else but Trembley’s polyps (see Baker 1952: 42). This fame was achieved, in part, by means of a ‘strategy of generosity’ (Ratcliffe 2004), i.e., his rapid dissemination of specimens, methods and results across Western Europe to create a circle of collaborators and fellow enthusiasts. And so, his research came to be lauded as ‘the most astonishing spectacle that has ever been presented to the human eye’ (G. Bazin, quoted in Vartanian 1950: 267).4 But this astonishment also laid bare anxiety too: Bonnet spoke of such a spectacle ‘overturning all of my ideas and putting my brain on fire’; he continues that, while the ‘famous polyp … so astonished physicists’, it ‘embarrassed metaphysicians even more’ (2002: 170). And the embarrassment to metaphysicians was, broadly speaking, threefold: 1.

2.

In exhibiting both plant-like and animal-like features, the polyp appeared to resist any straightforward categorisation: it took on an anomalous position at the threshold of the two natural kingdoms. Trembley himself raises the possibility of freshwater polyps being ‘plantanimals’ (1986: 11), before—on R. A. F. Reaumur’s advice—coming down on the side of animality (1986: 11). However, others remained unconvinced. On the one hand, there were those like Voltaire who insisted, contra Trembley, that the polyp was obviously a plant, that, indeed, a musical automaton ‘looks more like a man than a polyp looks like an animal’ (1768: 10–12).5 On the other hand, the ‘Geneva interpretation’ of the experiments (primarily propounded by Bonnet) situated the polyp as a ‘zoophyte’ that held an intermediate position between the plant and the animal kingdom (Dawson 1987). Hence, on hearing of Trembley’s experiments, Bonnet immediately exclaims, ‘One can say that you have discovered the point of passage from the Vegetable to the Animal’ (Dawson 1987: 138; see further Lenhoff and Lenhoff 1986: 36–38). And what is more, anxiety over the precise taxonomical position of the polyp is still palpable in 1790s Germany: Hegel and Schelling again worry over its hybridity, but, unlike Bonnet, place it firmly within a fairly traditional order of nature as an inferior animal to the human. According to F. W. J. Schelling, for example, polyps exemplify a basic mode of reproduction that seems at first glance plant-like due to its mode of reproduction, but is ultimately animal: ‘The polyp is the simplest animal, and the stalk, as it were, out of which all other animals have sprouted’ (2001: 43). On Schelling’s model the polyps’ generation is succeeded by more complex forms of reproduction in ‘higher’ animals. The hydra-like powers of regeneration exhibited by the polyp proved a particular flashpoint. As Bonnet again worries, ‘If one cuts off these heads and tails, they will give just as many perfect polyps. Ovid’s fecund imagination did not go so far!’ (2002: 171–72). On the one hand, such asexual reproduction seemed to upset natural law: as recently as Reaumur, the principle that all animal generation requires the coupling of male and female had been taken as universal (see Dawson 1987: 92). On the other hand, the accidental nature of the experimental dissection which caused polyps to multiply sat uneasily with notions of divine providence: the order vouchsafed to the generative process (by the anthropocentric model of mating) was lost and became contingent on a chance incision. As Dawson summarises, ‘Materialism and vitalism … took on a new intellectual respectability … Regeneration implied that matter contained active properties, previously attributed to the benevolence of the Creator’ (1987: 8). For some, Trembley had supplied evidence for the materialist faith in matter’s self-(re)generation. Such, for example, are the conclusions that La Mettrie drew: ‘Trembley’s polyp! Does it not contain within itself the causes which produce its regeneration? … Matter possesses intrinsically the causes of its activity and organisation’ (La Mettrie: 3/164, 3/171; trans. Vartanian 1950: 270–71). 150

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3.

The growing threat of materialism also motivated a further debate over the animal soul. Drawing on an anti-Cartesian tradition of attributing formative principles to animals, the question arose as to exactly how such formative principles could accommodate the polyp—that is, how, after dissection, could each of its parts equally possess one of those principles. As Reaumur immediately inquired of Trembley, ‘Are there souls which are divisible?’ (quoted in Dawson 1987: 149)—or, as Bonnet wondered in more detail:

How could the soul of such an animal be divided? How could it be rediscovered whole in each part? … What is here the seat of personality? By cutting up the polyp, one creates a hydra with many heads: is there an individual soul in each of these heads? Are there as many distinct personalities as there are heads? All these questions and a host of others that the polyp gave rise to appear at first sight to be indecipherable enigmas. (2002: 364–65) At stake was the divisibility of the animate soul and its relation to the various parts of the body—and this again naturally led towards a materialist position which would eliminate in one stroke the very problem of an animate soul separated from or irreducible to matter.

3 A taxonomy of polyp-thinking Historians of science have drawn on the above to argue variously that Trembley’s experiments represented a turn to experimental rather than observational biology, a paradigm example of modern scientific method, a flashpoint for debate between materialists and vitalists or epigeneticists and preformationists, and a problem in organising a scale of natural kinds. We want to suggest that the implications reach further than these topical debates to, in fact, impact on the conceptualisation of thinking itself. The features of the polyp described above also influenced accounts of rationality and philosophical practice. In other words, the polyp did not just provoke new doctrinal controversies; it was also used to model how to think. To make this claim, we deploy the concept of ‘polyp-thinking’ which is intended to designate the philosophical project of making sense of human thinking in analogy with the polypic features identified in the previous section. The term derives from the concept of ‘polyp-style’, coined by Yoichi Sumi (1985; see Sumi 2013: 19–20) and developed by Annie Ibrahim (2010: 73–92) to name Diderot’s deployment of the model of the polyp to articulate his metaphilosophical principles. Indeed, ‘polyp-style’ draws on a long tradition of Diderot scholarship—from Jean Starobinski (1975) to Jacques Proust (1981) and Mai Spangler (1997)—attentive to the effects of Diderot’s constant recourse to the polyp on how he philosophises. Our contention is that the concept can be extended to include a number of philosophers in the second half of the eighteenth century working in many different intellectual contexts. Polyp-thinking is discernible in the philosophies of Bonnet in Geneva, Allamand and Hemsterhuis in Leiden, Reaumur, Buffon and La Mettrie in Paris, Folkes (as President of the Royal Society) in London, Kielmeyer in Stuttgart, Schelling in Jena and even Hegel in Berlin—and, in this essay, we preliminarily elucidate a few of these instances of polypthinking. These philosophers are, in general, very different from each other, and, even when they do share principles, this typically has very little to do with responses to the polyp per se or even responses to each other’s reflections on the polyp. Moreover, these philosophers are not necessarily interested in applying the very same properties of the polyp to thinking, nor, in fact, do they

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necessarily positively value any of these properties. Any full-blown version of this taxonomy would need to incorporate both Diderot’s ‘polyp-enthusiasm’ and Hegel’s ‘polyp-anxiety’. Indeed, polyp-anxiety became an increasingly visible phenomenon after 1789. The French Revolution marks a symbolic watershed, since, while the blade of the experimental scientist may be life-giving when it comes to the freshwater polyp, the blade of the guillotine had no such generative results. The Terror seemingly demonstrated that, whatever else humans were, they were not hydras; they did not regenerate into new individuals when their heads were cut off. And yet, polypic regeneration still haunted the post-Revolution imagination: the aristocracy was figured as ‘a political polyp, which is raised from death and regenerates section by section’ and the monarchy compared to ‘the polyp, vulnerable and capable of being resurrected everywhere’ (see Lechevrel et al. 2016). That is, a fear of the return of the repressed was figured polypically: in the nineteenth century, Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables will speak in this vein of criminal activity as ‘the monstrous polyp of evil inhabiting the crypt of society’ (1881–82: 485). In its flouting of conventional laws of nature, the polyp represented a deviant principle. In philosophical texts, a corresponding polyp-anxiety led, in particular, to a tendency to radically demarcate the human from the polyp, so as to inoculate reason against the latter’s transgressive properties. In contrast to the drive to ‘self-polypisation’ (Curran 2001: 92) that we will trace in Diderot’s writings below, Hegel and Schelling refuse to allow polyps to obfuscate clear taxonomic hierarchies; they put them firmly back in their place as precisely that which is non-human and non-rational. This is a reaffirmation of the classical chain of being: demarcated from what is proper to humanity, the polyp is consigned to an inferior form of life—or, to put it another way, for Hegel and Schelling, the human is human precisely insofar as she has very different capacities to a polyp. And this is for two reasons. First, polyps are not diverse enough: the ground for their status as the lowest possible form of animal life is based on a supposed lack of qualitative diversity, i.e., the limited number of functions they possess. This can be manifest in terms of fewer capacities, fewer kinds of each capacity, and in lesser development of the organs that facilitate these functions; Schelling, for example, writes: ‘The final contraction of all senses into one homogeneous sense (as in the polyps) shows that that force begins to become always more uniform backward in the series from man, and finally disappears in completely involuntary movements’ (2001: 145). Second, polyps are considered too diverse, i.e., they do not constitute a single, clear whole with dependent parts, but rather spread into numerous independent individuals. It is for this reason that they are likened to plants by Hegel, who writes that: In short, any part of the plant can exist immediately as the complete individual; this is never the case with animals, apart from polyps and other completely rudimentary animal species. Strictly speaking therefore, a plant is an aggregate of a number of individuals constituting a single individual, the parts of which are however completely independent. It is this independence of its parts which constitutes the impotence of the plant. The animal on the contrary has viscera, dependent members, the whole existence of which is dependent solely upon the unity of the whole. (1970: 58) New polyps lack subjective unity. The emphasis on relations of dependence in higher organisations refers back to the Aristotelian claim (which Hegel echoes) that in an animal, a hand, once cut off, is no longer a hand. The unity of an animal is such that parts get their identity via their reference to the whole of which they are a part. Consequently, Hegel writes that ‘polyps, like plants, are composed of several individuals, and will survive shredding; even the garden 152

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snail will grow a new head. This reproductiveness stems from a weakness in the organism’s substantiality’ (1970: 187). Hegel here reveals his anxiety over precisely that feature of the polyp—its regenerative adaptability—that others celebrate. He thus draws back from some of the possible radical implications of polyp life (i.e., by problematising diversity as diversity, or, diversity that is not integrated into a part-whole relationship) and, instead, places the polyp at the bottom of the chain of organisations—far from human rationality.

4 Diderot and parthenogenesis Things are very different with Diderot. The polyp appears throughout his corpus under many guises, particularly as a metaphor for other regions of being. For example, it serves to describe the natural world in its entirety in a 1759 letter to Sophie Volland, where he exclaims, ‘It is believed that there is only one polyp; yet why would the whole of nature not be of the same order?’ (2010: 79). The claim is that organic nature is polypic. And similar claims are evident in many passages in La Rêve d’Alembert, which is in toto ‘a kind of allegorical epic for the formation of worlds and for the prodigality of living nature where the polyp plays the role of prototype of beings’ (Ibrahim 2010: 67).6 The text flits from image to image in order to imagine a materialism of the organic, and, as part of this process, one image of the organism as a swarm of bees (i.e., a composite composed of discrete organs working in unison7) gives way to the figure of the polyp. At this moment, d’Alembert deliriously conjectures that to dissect the swarm of bees is not to destroy life, but rather to generate new organisms: Take your scissors … and cut these bees apart for me … Suppose that these bees are very small, so small that their vital parts would always be missed by the thick blade of your scissors: then you could keep on dividing and subdividing as long as you pleased without killing a single bee. In that case the whole bunch, made up of imperceptibly small bees, would be a genuine polyp. (1972: 324; 1974: 172) Again, Diderot implies that organic life operates on a polypic model; this is, he continues, as true of humans as it is of earthworms (‘Your idea is that there are polyps of all sorts, even human polyps’ [1972: 326; 1974: 174]). Even when this conjecture encounters the obstacle of empirical fact, i.e., the fact that humans cannot reproduce by division or, in Diderot’s words, that ‘we do not find any such thing [as a human polyp] in nature’ (1972: 326; 1974: 174), it is merely displaced into different times (the ancient past and the distant future) and different places (other planets). Thus, the texts concludes: either the emergence of human polyps ‘has already happened, or it will happen. And besides, who knows how things may be on some of the other planets? … Perhaps on Jupiter or Saturn there are human polyps!’ (1972: 327; 1974: 174). Elsewhere in Diderot’s work the metaphor of the polyp is further deployed to recommend an improved kind of philosophical rationality: The argument of the philosopher is only a skeleton, that of the orator is a living animal. It is a species of polyp. Divide it and it will give birth to a quantity of other living animals. It is a hydra with a hundred heads. (1959: 259) In this passage, Diderot has recourse to the figure of the polyp to both criticise existing philosophical practice and recommend an alternative. The polyp acts as a cipher for life as such 153

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(organic spontaneity ceaselessly sprouting new, rich ideas) and this vitality is held up as an ideal for thinking. It is a vitalist ideal for philosophising that stands opposed to the rigid, dead norms of the philosophical tradition. That is, this maxim serves as a call to bring philosophy to life. The point, as Diderot puts it elsewhere, is that past philosophies have been ‘the enemy of movement and figures’ (1959: 72); they were stuck within static categories of ‘being, manner of being, substance, qualities’ (Proust 1981: 23). In their place, Diderot is thus affirming the polypic qualities of ‘the accidental, the accessory, the circumstantial, in a word, all that qualifies a thing in its singularity’ (Proust 1981: 23). To philosophise polypically is to embrace plasticity and contingency: to eschew universal laws, rules or essences for the mutating singular.8 That is, here the feature of the freshwater polyp that matters most to Diderot is its endless parthenogenetic generation: it spontaneously produces the new over and over again. And such productivity is specified as a virtue for thinking in the above passage, because it both reflects and is nature: since the natural world itself is polypic, the best thinking is that which is capable of representing it accurately and participating in it fully. Diderot’s revitalisation of philosophy rests on the affirmation of ceaseless generation on both a metaphysical and an epistemic level. Nature and thinking are (or should be) metamorphic. In the natural world, since nothing external constrains material self-transformation, reality exists in a constant process of change: ‘All nature is in a perpetual state of flux’ (1972: 332; 1974: 181). Hence, there is no reason why the present would be the same as the past or the future; in fact, each moment in time is novel: there are no rules limiting what might come to exist at any moment (and this is why, in both the future and the past, human polyps are plausible). Diderot writes, ‘You assume that animals were in the beginning what they are at present. How absurd! We have no more idea of what they have been in the past than we have of what they will become’ (1972: 335; 1974: 154). That is, he summarises, ‘Not a single molecule remains for a moment just like itself’ (1972: 326; 1974: 174). To reflect this perpetual metamorphosis, philosophy must come to be modelled on the polyp: thinking must acknowledge the need for radical transformation. In other words, philosophy should recognise its own transience, i.e., the fact the philosopher herself is one impermanent monster always on the threshold of radical transformation, even ‘self-polypisation’ (Curran 2001: 92). It is this perpetual transformation of knowing that leads to the emphasis noted above on the circumstantial and the accidental in Diderotian polyp-thinking. Negatively, this is articulated as ‘the fallacy of the ephemeral’, i.e., the fallacy ‘of a transient being who believes in the immutability of things’, much like ‘Fontenelle’s rose, who declared that no gardener had ever been known to die’ (1972: 329; 1974: 177). To overcome it, the philosopher must subject any claims made according to fixed principles to rigorous scepticism. For all that is knowable is ‘the very incomplete history of an instant’ (1972: 104). However, such scepticism equally makes possible delirious speculations about past and future states of the world. To put it another way, Diderot limits knowledge to make room for conjecture. The talk of human polyps in the Rêve is, on this reading, not merely an example of the polyp as an object of speculation, but an illustration of polyp-thinking too. The very modes of thinking employed in this passage—the proliferation of ever-new images, scepticism about the permanence of the present state of affairs, speculative conjectures on radically different forms of life—are the basic building blocks of Diderotian polyp-thinking. It is for this reason that Spangler has called the Rêve ‘a monstrous text which functions on the biological model of the polyp’ (1997: 96).

5 Bonnet and the chain of being One 1744 report on Trembley’s experiments, found within the annals of the Parisian Académie royale des Sciences, begins, 154

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The story of the Phoenix that is born again from its ashes, wholly fabulous as it is, offers nothing more marvellous than the discovery of which we are about to speak. The chimerical ideas of the palingenesis or regeneration of plants and animals, which certain alchemists have thought possible by the assembly and reunion of their essential parts, only tended to restore a plant or an animal after its destruction … But here is nature going farther than our fancies. (Quoted in Baker 1952: 43–44)9 The appeal to the concept of palingenesis to contextualise Trembley’s achievements is particularly pertinent here, for Bonnet will go on to name his entire philosophical project ‘palingenesis’ in homage to the freshwater polyp. Its capacity for rebirth becomes the fundamental model for the course of nature, which, according to Bonnet, is always in the throes of being born anew. Palingenetic doctrine asserts that all current forms exist in the middle of a long series of metamorphoses; and, as such, death is merely ‘a kind of extraction’ (Bonnet 2002: 204) in which new forms of life emerge out of the old order. This is a polypic process: out of the ashes of extinction, a new set of organisms is produced. The theological implications are dear to Bonnet. On his view, this incessant rebirth of natural forms comprises material for ‘a physics of the Resurrection’ (2002: 206), i.e., the Christian doctrine of bodily Resurrection can—in the wake of the polyp—be understood as a process of natural production. Hence, whereas Diderot renders nature polyp-like in order to further materialism, Bonnet does so expressly to resist materialist tendencies. For him, everything turns on how one reacts to the Trembleyan primal scene: We all know how much delirium on the nature of the soul resulted from the discovery of the polyp. The materialists seized on it with avidity to justify their favourite dogma. The sceptics redoubled their vain declarations on the uncertainty of our knowledge. The true philosophers remained silent without daring to attempt a solution to the problem. (2002: 82) Along these lines, Bonnet frames his project as giving succour to ‘the true philosopher’ by reestablishing good sense in the wake of the polyp-delirium exploited by materialists. He continues, ‘My goal was principally to show, at the very least, that the discovery of the polyp does not favour a materialist world at all’ (2002: 365). He hopes to demonstrate that—despite all intuitions to the contrary—the polyp bolsters a theistic worldview in which ‘movement is not essential to matter’ (2002: 421; see Vartanian 1950: 279). This fight against materialism is pursued on numerous fronts: by defending a renewed preformationism against epigenesis; by demonstrating the immateriality of the I; by grounding natural progress in a metaphysical variant of the principle of perfectibility; and, most pertinently for this chapter, by refusing to ‘animalise everything’ (2002: 379) as the materialists had done. While Diderot flouts boundaries by locating organic production everywhere, Bonnet insists on preserving distinctions and hierarchies; he insists on a chain of being. His first work, the Traité d’insectologie, is founded on the explicit acknowledgment that Trembley’s polyps served as the occasion for his restoration of a modified doctrine of the chain of being. He writes that what ‘gave birth to the perhaps foolhardy thought to draw up a Ladder of Natural Beings’ was the various features that ‘can be seen above all in polyps’. He specifies, ‘The admirable properties which [polyps] have in common with plants, that is to say, the multiplication by budding and by cuttings indicates sufficiently that they are the tie which unites the vegetable kingdom to the 155

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animal’—and so they provide the key evidence for the idea that there are species ‘which seem to hold a middle place [as] points of passage or links’ (1745: xi). Moreover, as Lovejoy (1936: 285–86) noted, it is the dynamic nature of Bonnet’s chain that sets it apart from traditional articulations, i.e., not all links in the chain are manifest at any one moment in time; rather, they are all preordained to exist at some point during the earth’s history. According to Bonnet, palingenetic rebirth is forever producing new types of being, and these novel organisms populate missing links in the chain.10 Bonnetian nature is therefore indebted to the polyp in two ways. First, the polyp’s intermediary status as missing link reveals to Bonnet the ordered, chain-like sequence of the natural world. Second, the polyp’s distinctive mode of generation is one source for the doctrine of palingenesis, which models how organisms come to populate the entire chain. And for our purposes what is crucial is that Bonnet also frames his own philosophical practice around this twofold polypic model. Philosophy should not merely accurately describe this chain of organic beings, but should perform it, too. This is Bonnetian polyp-thinking: a chain-like mode of reasoning that imitates the palingenetic dynamics of the natural world. In this vein, Bonnet writes of his 1769 La palingénésie philosophique, ‘My book forms a chain and this chain is long’ (2002: 40), and likewise, both the 1762 Considerations and the 1754 Essai are said to ‘form a chain of facts and consequences’ (2002: 58). And this insistence on the chainlike form of the philosophical text presupposes that Bonnet takes seriously the isomorphism between nature and thinking. That is, he attends to ‘the natural generation of my ideas on each subject’ (2002: 10; our italics), to the need to understand philosophical reasoning on naturalist terms. Hence, the chain of being influences how we should think, as well as what we should think: just as Diderot’s delirious excesses imitate the unfettered natural generation they describe, so too Bonnet understands his inferences as mimicking the very chain of being that constitutes natural order.11 Philosophy works, according to Bonnet, when every argumentative step is ‘well linked’ (2002: 54).12 Moreover, unlike Diderot and in accordance perhaps with Bonnet’s more ambivalent stance towards the metaphysical crisis occasioned by Trembley’s experiments, Bonnet is unsure about the virtues of this species of thinking. For instance, one reason that the analogy between the chain of being and chains of reasoning is precarious is that (unlike the chain of being), when it comes to thinking in chains, if one of the initial links proves faulty, then all of the reasoning falls apart: Such is the natural destiny that menaces all analytic works; if one manages to destroy its fundamental principle, to detach the master-link from the chain, then the whole work will be no more than a series of more or less erroneous propositions. (2002: 76) Furthermore, the conjectural, ‘purely analogical’ relation (2002: 425) between many of the links results in a far weaker degree of certainty than thinking by observation alone (‘I have not said I have found, but rather it seems to me, I conjecture, one can infer from it’ [2002: 51]). In sum, even though a philosophical thinking that imitates the polypic chain of being is demanded by the structure of the natural world, the philosopher must still acknowledge its risks.

6 Kielmeyer and adaptability Johann A. E. Goeze translated Trembley’s Mémoires into German in 1775 with the explicit intention of intervening in philosophical debates as much as scientific ones. His Preface states, 156

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‘I do not have to convince those who know its contents that Trembley’s work is worth translating. His work has had a resounding impact not only on natural history, but also on philosophy’ (1791: vii; see Lenhoff and Lenhoff, 1986: 1). And the second edition of 1791 did, indeed, appear during a time of heightened interest in the polyp; it coincided with a new wave of philosophical uses of the polyp. For instance, Kielmeyer may well have read Trembley in the original French, but his Karlsschule address, Über die Verhältnisse der organischen Kräfte unter einander in der Reihe der verschiedenen Organisationen—given in Stuttgart on February 11, 1793—is marked by resurgent interest in the freshwater polyp. Moreover, and most pertinently, it includes an explicit, if passing employment of the polyp-metaphor to model human rationality. Kielmeyer’s address understands the organic world both synchronically and diachronically in terms of a comparative distribution of organic forces. Under the influence of J. F. Blumenbach, Albrecht Haller and J. G. Herder, Kielmeyer provisionally posits five such forces, adaptable both in their qualitative deployment and their quantitative distribution across species-kinds. For example, the deployment of these forces in some species will foster a greater rate of reproduction, while, in others, it will generate more diverse or refined sensory capacities. He, thus, understands the dynamic distribution of forces within the framework of an economy in which lack in one kind is offset or ‘compensated’ by the strength of another. What is important for our purposes is that, according to Kielmeyer’s speech, the polyp’s regenerative capacities provide not only one example of the plasticity of living force in general (in that they manifest a great amount of reproductive power), but also the central metaphor for reflecting on this plasticity when it comes to human rationality. At the end of the address, Kielmeyer turns to the human being against the background of such a series of dynamic forces in the organic world. He briefly surveys the ways in which environmental privations that afflict the human in one respect are compensated in another (e.g., ‘northerners compensate for the poverty of their strip of land … with calm imagination and cold understanding’ [1993: 45; 2020: 45]). This plasticity, he continues, is the great advantage of humanity; indeed, he concludes his brief survey with the claim that: ‘With this capacity to replace each loss in another respect, [humankind] could spread its species over the earth, and it is with this capacity that each individual … still now navigates the wide sea of life safely’ (1993: 45; 2020: 45). Moreover, in the next paragraph, he develops this conclusion further with a reference to the polyp: ‘With every privation the human spirit experiences on one side, it [the human spirit] supplements itself, like the polyp, on the other. A flower cut off only brings forth a new one’ (1993: 46; 2020: 45). This mechanism of self-supplementation, he continues, constitutes the defining feature of the human (‘the character of our species’) and can, in fact, be designated the human’s ‘capacity of compensation’ or ‘the capacity to flourish under all external circumstances’ (1993: 46; 2020: 45). Kielmeyer interprets the polyp’s response to injury as one cipher for the struggle between individuals and species that occurs more generally in his interpretation of the natural world, and, here, power is figured as the ability to respond or adapt to a negation. Just as the polyp can react to injury by growing in new directions, so, in Kielmeyer’s view of the human mind, adaptive response to adversity is identified as a central feature of flourishing. Polyp-thinking—even if it is only momentarily invoked—specifies the capacity of the human species to adapt and develop in diverse directions. Thus, Kielmeyer—like Diderot and Bonnet—applies the figure of the polyp analogically to the ideal realm, and, in so doing, he embeds human capacities into his overall picture of ‘the great machine of the organic world’ (1993: 5; 2020: 30). Hence, this passing invocation of a polyp-thinking is premised on the adaptability of the polyp’s reproductive capacities; its plastic productivity copes with loss by generating anew. Human rationality is polyp-like, on this model, because it supplements itself by self-generation—in other words: human 157

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flourishing depends on a capacity to productively manipulate power in the natural world. One of Kielmeyer’s central examples of the polyp-like capabilities of human reason is the early modern drive to create ‘microscopes and telescopes for eye and ear’ (1993: 42; 2020: 44). These inventions, he argues, follow the same logic of self-supplementation, for they ‘thereby heighten [the human’s] sensorial capacity’ (1993: 42; 2020: 44). Reason can regenerate itself into novel forms, and technological prosthesis is one of these ways to enhance human power in the world. Or, to return to Kielmeyer’s overall description of organic nature: the polyp’s capacity for multidirectional growth in response to dismemberment models the way in which a quantity of force remains constant no matter what adverse circumstances it suffers, ‘in the same way that light appears split into different rays, and these rays are mixed in infinitely different proportions’ (1993: 44; 2020: 44). For Kielmeyer, this polyp model is as valid for human mental capacities as it is for organic life in general.

7 Conclusions: from the real to the ideal The types of polyp-thinking discernible in the three case studies above are not reducible to each other: the polyp is analogically transposed onto human rationality in very different ways in each instance. Diderot enthusiastically embraces the spontaneous proliferation of the freshwater polyp as a template for good philosophising; Bonnet more diffidently describes his philosophical practice in terms of the ordered dynamics of a chain of being determined by his encounter with Trembley’s experiments; and Kielmeyer has recourse to polyp-generation to make sense of the plasticity of a human ‘capacity of compensation’. There is, nevertheless, we contend, one similarity that holds across the three case studies, and that is a tendency to naturalise thought. All three variants of polyp-thinking exemplify an attempt—increasingly common in the second half of the eighteenth century—to utilise models from organic nature to explain the self, consciousness, freedom and intellectual activity. Diderot, Bonnet and Kielmeyer are naturalists in their descriptions of thinking. This is not, of course, to claim that they all undertake a materialist reduction of human reason by analogically modelling it on the polyp (Bonnet might better be said to ‘idealise’ the polyp, than to make mind material). Rather, what does appear to partially unite all three philosophers is the intuition that natural phenomena possess heuristic value when it comes to describing the ideal realm, i.e., the domain of human thinking and philosophical practice. Diderot, Bonnet and Kielmeyer all subscribe to a method of analogy that presupposes some univocity between the physical and the mental; they thereby contravene the Aristotelian prohibition on metabasis ex allou genous by transposing models from the domain of nature onto that of the mind. They each affirm, that is, the productive value of category errors. To put it slightly anachronistically, their projects all approximate, to various extents, to a philosophy of nature, i.e., a philosophical programme oriented around what F. W. J. Schelling will dub ‘the principle of a philosophy of nature’ (2001: 17)—the principle that natural structures and processes can be and must be explained with reference to nature alone. Indeed, what Iain Hamilton Grant has written of philosophies of nature can also be extended across these case studies too: the nature-philosophical attempt to construct ‘a natural history of our mind’ (2006: 104–105) necessitates a naturalistic approach to the explanation of thinking, ‘a dynamics of ideation’ (2006: 45). This is, Grant continues, the key component of the naturephilosophical programme—a ‘natural description of thinking and thought’ (2006: 119). In Grant’s wake, there have, moreover, been a raft of works that have tried to appreciate the diverse ways in which philosophers of nature naturalise the ideal. Andrea Gambarotto, for instance, has similarly insisted on the late eighteenth-century ‘naturalization of subjectivity’, where the mind is ‘vitally grounded as coextensive with … biological systems’ (2020: 167). 158

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Likewise, Jocelyn Holland has unearthed a rich seam of ‘lever-thinking’ in German philosophies of nature, elucidating ‘a historical tendency to understand certain aspects of being human, such as making judgments, thinking, or organising concepts, in terms of the activity of the lever’ (2019: 14). Scientific imagery is here ‘deeply entangled with descriptions of the human’ (2019: 1), whether that be Herbart’s ‘statics and mechanics of the mind’ or Friedrich Schlegel’s assertion that ‘the active free human is his own hypomochlion’ (2019: 100). Recent interest in Kant’s idea of ‘a system of the epigenesis of pure reason’ mentioned above is another example of this trend, and we furthermore intend for our taxonomy of polyp-thinking to be situated within it too. And yet, there is at least one respect in which our analysis departs, even if only minimally and preliminarily, from much of the Anglophone research in this area. Many studies in this field have tended to employ national, linguistic or even disciplinary boundaries to delimit their studies—prioritising post-Kantian German projects at the expense of all others. This strikes us as an arbitrary limitation ultimately contingent on research norms that have remained in force since the nineteenth century, according to which philosophical traditions are to be organised around national borders. It seems, in fact, to have very little to do with the actual sociology of philosophising during the second half of the eighteenth century: networks of influence, production and dissemination did not respect such geographical, or even linguistic boundaries. Where, therefore, we hope that the above cursory survey of polyp-thinking might begin—minimally and preliminarily—to go beyond other recent accounts of naturalisms of thinking in eighteenth-century philosophy is in its attention to transnational contexts. The various ways in which polyps and rationality are juxtaposed in the case studies illustrate a tendency to naturalise thinking that is widespread across Europe after 1740—a tendency manifest in Paris, Geneva, Stuttgart and far beyond.

Notes 1 ‘Muck worm philosophers’ is Tobias Smollett’s epithet for the vogue in the 1740s to undertake philosophy by way of the microscopic inspection of the smallest living beings—whether they be Trembley’s polyps, Bonnet’s aphids and worms or the raft of ‘insecto-theologies’ from the time. See Baker (1952: 45). 2 At least initially, he was unaware that freshwater polyps had previously been subject to classification, although this would not have helped him much, since Antonie van Leuwenhoeck had described them as animals and Bernard de Jussieu as plants. See Dawson (1987: 100). 3 More fully, he writes of his experiment: ‘To cut a polyp transversely, I place it with a little water in the hollow of my left hand … When I have it as I want it, I delicately pass one blade of the scissors, which I hold in my right hand, under the part of the polyp’s body where it is to be severed. Then I close the scissors, and immediately after having divided the polyp, I examine the two halves under the magnifying glass in order to assess the outcome of the operation’ (Trembley, 1986: 142). And the outcome is as follows: ‘It looks … exactly like a polyp which has never been divided; thus, both halves can be considered complete polyps. They exhibit all the known properties of these animals: they perform all the movements of which polyps are capable; they seize prey; they feed on it; they grow and multiply’ (1986: 143). 4 The language of marvel was often employed by Trembley and others. The polyp was a challenge to the senses, both worrying and also vindicating the pure empiricism then in vogue. For example, Trembley himself writes of these ‘strange facts’ that ‘at first I could scarcely believe what I was seeing with my own eyes’ (1986: 2), and he goes on to quote Reaumur’s reaction: ‘I could scarcely believe my eyes. It is a phenomenon I simply cannot get used to seeing, even after seeing it again and again hundreds and hundreds of times’ (1986: 3). 5 The full quotation reads: ‘M. Vaucanson’s flautist looks more like a man than a polyp looks like an animal’—Jacques de Vaucanson, a French inventor, constructed many famed automata (including ‘the Turk’ and the ‘digesting duck’) in the mid-1700s. Voltaire is here referring to Vaucanson’s automaton ‘the flute player’, presented to the Académie des Sciences in 1738.

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Lydia Azadpour and Daniel Whistler 6 In these passages, Diderot is not just drawing on the productivity of Trembley’s polyp, but also its capacity for hybridity. Just as Trembley grafted one polyp onto another to make a new ‘monstrous’ organism, so too Diderot celebrates the monstrous hybridity of all organisms. 7 Or, as Diderot himself puts, the component organs of an organism resemble ‘distinct animals held together by the law of continuity in a general bond of sympathy, unity or identity’ (1972: 323; 1974: 171). 8 The Rêve is explicit on this point: ‘You poor philosophers, and you talk about essences! Drop your idea of essences’ (1972: 338; 1974: 181). 9 On the alchemical background to the concept of palingenesis, see Marx (1971). 10 It is worth emphasising at this point that, while the ceaseless production of the polyp may seem, to contemporary eyes, to consist in a sterile production of the same (a biological instantiation of the Hegelian bad infinite), for Diderot and Bonnet polypic generation is metamorphic—that is, what emerges from polypic generation is something substantially new. 11 In fact, Bonnet’s polypic chains of reasoning also share, in part, the character of ‘speculative scepticism’ that characterises Diderot’s polyp-thinking. Since the natural world is constantly being born anew, it has a metamorphic structure: there are no permanent essences. As with Diderot, ontology is converted into ontogenesis, even if, in Bonnet’s case, such ontogenesis is preordained. Thus, Bonnet writes, ‘One must not imagine that animals will have in their future state the same form, the same structure, the same parts, the same consistency, the same size as we see in their current state. They will thus be as different from what they are today as the state of our globe will differ from its present state. If we were permitted to contemplate at present this delightful scene of metamorphosis, I am convinced that we could recognise no species of animal which are today the most familiar: they too would be changed to our eyes’ (2002: 139). Bonnet is explicit: what we now experience can tell us nothing about the past and the future; each transformation is unprethinkable, because we ‘lack analogous ideas’ or ‘terms of comparison’ (2002: 370). Again, therefore, this is a scepticism about the permanent that liberates the philosopher to conjecture on radically different states of being. 12 Anderson sums up this line of thought: ‘Insistent repetition [in Bonnet’s texts] indicates something other, I think, than a redundant literary style or the absence of an editor: it is a procedure required by Bonnet’s relational view of the universe. In a world in which every particular thing is not simply a part of a harmoniously interconnected reality but, more fundamentally, derives its own identity, its locus, from the myriad relations it sustains with everything else, every part implies every other part’ (1982: 122).

References Anderson, L. (1982) Charles Bonnet and the Order of the Known, Dordrecht: Reidel. Baker, J. R. (1952) Abraham Trembley: Scientist and Philosopher, 1710–1784, London: Edward Arnold. Bonnet, C. (1745) Traité d’insectologie, Paris: Durand. Bonnet, C. (2002) La palingénésie philosophique, Paris: Fayard. Bonnet, C. and G. Cramer (1987) The Bonnet-Cramer Correspondence, in V. P. Dawson (ed.), Nature’s Enigma: The Problem of the Polyp in the Letters of Bonnet, Trembley and Reaumur, Philadelphia, PA: American Philosophical Society, 239–243. Bonnet, C. and A. Trembley (1987) The Bonnet-Trembley Correspondence, in V. P. Dawson (ed.), Nature’s Enigma: The Problem of the Polyp in the Letters of Bonnet, Trembley and Reaumur, Philadelphia, PA: American Philosophical Society, 189–238. Curran, D. (2001) Sublime Disorder: Physical Monstrosity in Diderot’s Universe, Oxford: Voltaire Foundation. Dawson, V. P. (1987) Nature’s Enigma: The Problem of the Polyp in the Letters of Bonnet, Trembley and Reaumur, Philadelphia, PA: American Philosophical Society. Diderot, D. (1959) Œuvres esthétiques, (ed.) P. Vernière, Paris: Garnier. Diderot, D. (1972) Œuvres philosophiques, (ed.) P. Vernière, Paris: Garnier. Diderot, D. (1974) Rameau’s Nephew and D’Alembert’s Dream, (trans.) L. Tancock, London: Penguin. Diderot, D. (2010) Lettres à Sophie Volland. 1759–1774, (ed.) M. Buffat and O. Richard-Pauchet, Paris: Non-Lieu. Gambarotto, A. (2020) Kielmeyer and the Cybernetics of the Organic World, in L. Azadpour and D. Whistler (eds.), Kielmeyer and the Organic World, London, Bloomsbury, 149–170. Grant, I. H. (2006) Philosophies of Nature after Schelling, London: Continuum. Hegel, G. W. F. (1970) Philosophy of Nature, Vol. 3, (trans.) M. J. Petry, London: Routledge.

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Polyp-thinking in the eighteenth century Holland, J. (2019) The Lever as Instrument of Reason: Technological Constructions of Knowledge around 1800, London: Bloomsbury. Hugo, V. (1881–82) Les Misérables, Paris: Hachette. Ibrahim, A. (2010) Diderot: un matérialisme éclectique, Paris: Vrin. Kant, I. (1929) Critique of Pure Reason, (trans.) N. K. Smith, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Kielmeyer, C. F. (1993) Über die Verhältnisse der organischen Kräfte unter einander, in der Reihe der verschiedenen Organisationen, die Gesetze und Folgen diese Verhältnisse, (ed.) K. T. Kanz, Marburg: Basiliken-Presse. Kielmeyer, C. F. (2020) On the Relations between Organic Forces in the Series of Different Organisations, L. Azadpour (trans.), in L. Azadpour and D. Whistler (eds.), Kielmeyer and the Organic World, London: Bloomsbury, 29–51. La Mettrie, J. O. (1796) Œuvres philosophiques, Berlin: Tutot. Lechevrel, N. et al. (2016) Le polype: Forms et savoirs, Projet Biolographes, last modified 29 March 2020, https://biolog.hypotheses.org/category/documents-et-oeuvres/le-polype-formes-et-savoirs. Lenhoff, S. G. and H. M. Lenhoff (1986) Hydra and the Birth of Experimental Biology, Pacific Grove, CA: Boxwood Press. Lovejoy, A. O. (1936) The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea, New Haven: Harvard University Press. Malabou, C. (2016) Before Tomorrow: Epigenesis and Rationality, (trans.) C. Shread, Cambridge: Polity. Marx, J. (1971) Alchimie et Palingénésie, Isis 62.3: 274–289. Mensch, J. (2013) Kant’s Organicism: Epigenesis and the Development of Critical Philosophy, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Proust, J. (1981) Diderot et la philosophie du Polype, Revue des sciences humaines 182: 21–30. Ratcliffe, M. J. (2004) Abraham Trembley’s Strategy of Generosity and the Scope of Celebrity in the MidEighteenth Century, Isis 95.4: 555–575. Sandford, S. (2013) Spontaneous Generation: The Fantasy of the Birth of Concepts in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Radical Philosophy 179: 15–26. Schelling, F. W. J. (2001) First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature, (trans.) K. R. Peterson, Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Spangler, M. (1997) Science, Philosophie et Littérature: le Polype de Diderot, Recherches sur Diderot et sur l’Encyclopédie 23: 89–107. Starobinski, J. (1975) Le Philosophe, le Géomètre, l’hybride, Poétique 21: 8–23. Sumi, Y. (1985) Traduire Diderot: Style Polype et Style Traduit, in A.-M. Chouillet (ed.), Colloque international Diderot, 4-11 juillet, 1984, Paris: Mélanges de la Bibliothèque de la Sorbonne, 255–260. Sumi, Y. (2013) Traduire Diderot aujourd’hui, Recherches sur Diderot et sur l’Encyclopédie 48: 19–36. Trembley, A. (1791) Abhandlungen zur Geschichte einer Polypenart des Süssen Wassers, (trans.) J. A. E. Goeze, Quedlinburg: Kreussers. Trembley, A. (1986) Memoires Concerning the Polyps, S. G. Lenhoff (trans.), in S. G. Lenhoff and H. M. Lenhoff (eds.), Hydra and the Birth of Experimental Biology, Vol. 2, Pacific Grove, CA: Boxwood Press, 1–167. Vartanian, A. (1950) Trembley’s Polyp, La Mettrie, and Eighteenth-Century French Materialism, Journal of the History of Ideas 11.3: 259–286. Voltaire (1768) Les singularités de la nature par un Académicien de Londres, de Boulogne, de Petersbourg, de Berlin, Basel.

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12 THE MYTHIC IMAGINATION AS AN ‘EXPERIMENT IN PHILOSOPHY’ Erich Unger’s contribution to the phenomenology of thinking Bruce Rosenstock

In the first decades of the twentieth century in Germany, and especially during the early 1920s in the aftermath of the First World War, a number of thinkers turned to myth as a way forward for both German philosophy and German society as a whole. Theodor Adorno’s Negative Dialectics and Georg Lukács’s Destruction of Reason devote considerable critical attention to this phenomenon, but I believe that it is time for a more positive assessment. This chapter deals with perhaps the period’s most analytically rigorous and fully developed attempt at unfolding the logic of the mythic imagination as the organon for ‘making possible an impossible experiential world’ (‘eine unmögliche Erfahrungswelt … möglich zu machen’) (1925: 141), in the words of Erich Unger (1887–1950), the thinker at the centre of this chapter.1 Unger believed that a proper understanding of the mythic imagination would reveal that it allowed consciousness to access transempirical objects—the ‘gods’ of ancient cults—whose power could be used to transform the biological structure of the human species. Unger’s work, too little-known today, is devoted to preparing a new way to think philosophically, where thinking becomes an experiment in the radical alteration of the biological givens of the human species. Unger is best known today because Walter Benjamin quotes from his 1921 book Politik und Metaphysik (republished as Unger (1989)) in his essay Zur Kritik der Gewalt (2002: 179–203). In a letter to his friend Gershom Scholem, Benjamin went so far as to say that Unger’s book promised to be ‘the most significant piece of writing on politics in our time’ (1994: 172). Benjamin adds that he has ‘an extremely lively interest in his [Unger’s] ideas’. Of particular interest, Benjamin goes on to explain, are Unger’s ideas concerning ‘the psychophysical problem’, which ‘surprisingly have some points in common with my own’ (1994: 173).2 Although there have been a number of studies devoted to Benjamin’s views about the psychophysical problem (Fenves 2011; Kohlenbach 2005: 85–102), there has been very little written about Unger’s work on this problem.3 This chapter seeks to provide an account of Unger’s unique contribution to a philosophical problematic, the interrelation of the psychical and physical aspects of the human being and of animate life more generally, that was so important to many

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thinkers of his generation, especially those who pursued the phenomenological approach opened by Franz Brentano, Edmund Husserl and Alexius Meinong. Unger’s approach to the psychophysical problem was grounded in his study of the altered states of consciousness that, he believed, were only displayed in connection with a collective body of individuals, and in particular in those groups for whom the mythic imagination remains an active power. Unger’s (1922) dissertation, submitted to the University of Erlangen philosophy faculty, was entitled Das psychophysiologische Problem und sein Arbeitsgebiet: ein methodologische Einleitung (The psychophysiological problem and its disciplinary context: A methodological introduction) (Unger 1922). The dissertation focused on non-ordinary or altered states of consciousness manifested, for example, in hypnosis or in rituals practiced by yogis and shamans in non-Western societies. In the early 1920s, Unger published two works that drew high praise from Walter Benjamin: his Politik und Metaphysik in 1921 and Gegen die Dichtung in 1925. In 1930, Unger published his magnum opus, Mythos Erkenntnis Wirklichkeit (Unger 1930), and during the war when he lived in London he completed Das Lebendige und das Göttliche (Unger 1966). Although in the Weimar years Unger was very well known and quite highly regarded, not only by Benjamin but by most of the intellectuals centred in Berlin during those years, after Unger left Germany in 1933 and finally settled in London in 1936, he never managed to establish himself in British academic circles, perhaps in large part because his ideas about the mythic imagination did not resonate with the positivist temper of British philosophy at that time. Unger’s most significant impact was on the sociologist and novelist H. G. Adler whom he met in Berlin in 1932.4 Adler was a survivor of Theresienstadt and Auschwitz who composed some of the most important studies on the world of the concentration camps that we have today, and whose novels are now being credited as pathbreaking literary explorations of life under Nazi terror. Adler’s last publication is a work entitled Vorschule für eine Experimentaltheologie.5 The book adumbrates a critique of modern techno-scientific culture that is expressly grounded in Unger’s work on the mythic imagination. Adler’s proposal for the creation of an ‘experimental theology’ is his way of answering Unger’s call in Wirklichkeit Mythos Erkenntnis for an ‘experiment in philosophy’ (1930: 281) that would show how altered states of consciousness ‘promise not merely psychological variation of the contents of consciousness, but also variation in the actual effective power behind these contents, a power that is realized in this altered condition of consciousness (as if, in performing an experiment in empirical psychology someone were to discover that the “afterimage” of an optical phenomenon could be the equivalent in its effective power with the “real” impression that brought the afterimage into being)’ (1930: 284). In other words, Unger’s ‘experiment in philosophy’ would demonstrate a pathway to new objects of consciousness with the effective power of transforming the world, what he described as ‘natural miracles’ (1930: 66). Unger argued that the realm which would be opened by his experimental philosophy was previously accessed by the mythic imagination of ancient humanity in their ‘experimental religions’ (1930: 66–67). Adler hoped that the reactivation of the mythic imagination might provide the basis for a new intuition-based ‘theology’, much as Enlightenment philosophers hoped to establish a reason-based theology. Adler’s development of Unger’s experimental philosophy deserves its own separate treatment and I hope that this essay will lead to a fuller appreciation of Adler’s fascinating attempt to produce a grounding for a new ‘religion of humanity’. Unger’s attempt to work out a philosophically rigorous exposition of the nature of the mythic imagination ran very much against the grain of traditional philosophy. Indeed, philosophy since Parmenides had largely rejected mythic thinking as the manipulation of simulacra, as the way of doxa (semblance) in contrast with the way of truth, aletheia. Mythos stood as the very opposite of reason, logos. With the rise of Galilean science in the seventeenth century, what Parmenides had called doxa came to be identified with what John Locke named ‘secondary 163

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qualities’, whereas the realm of objective truth was occupied by extended bodies whose ‘primary qualities’ could be measured and whose movements conformed to mathematically formulated laws. The mythic imagination, according to this epistemological paradigm, was seen as nothing but the free play of fantasy with purely subjective appearances, simulacra of simulacra, decayed memory traces of secondary qualities recombined to form fantastical objects. Unger’s rehabilitation of the mythic imagination had its roots in the new conceptualization of secondary qualities that emerged, first of all, in the experimental psychophysics of the midnineteenth century, and, soon thereafter, in phenomenological psychology. Gustav Fechner’s (1860) classic Elements of Psychophysics set out to provide a scientifically rigorous analysis of secondary qualities. Fechner measured the intensive magnitude of secondary qualities in relation to the extensive magnitude of their excitatory stimuli. The perceivability of a secondary quality such as a tone or a colour requires that the magnitude of the stimulus pass above a certain threshold, and the perception of change in the quality’s intensity—the increasing loudness of a tone or brightness of a colour, for example—is, according to Fechner’s law, directly proportional to the logarithm of the stimulus’s intensity. Secondary qualities, Fechner argued, arise within an embodied consciousness as the psychical correlate of a single reality whose other aspect is studied by physics and other mathematical natural sciences. Secondary qualities mediate, in a manner accessible to experimental study in psychophysics, an organism’s relationship to the dual aspects of reality. Secondary qualities can be discounted in the study of inorganic matter, but they are the building blocks of the psychophysical study of the living organism within its environment, its Umwelt. Secondary qualities for Fechner, occupy a liminal realm between consciousness and material exteriority, between subjectivity and objectivity, between spirit and body. Fechner actually believed that consciousness extends deep into the organic world, existing even in plants below the threshold where, in higher organisms, perception of sensory qualities emerges. Erich Unger relies significantly upon Fechner’s theory of a sub-threshold consciousness at the level where the inorganic physico-chemical aspect of reality transitions into the psychic dimension of the living organism. At that sub-threshold level of the psychophysical organism, consciousness could be said to be the psychic membrane of the organism, a transitional boundary that is differently shaped, so to speak, for each distinct kind of organism. Sigmund Freud was working out similar ideas in Project for a Scientific Psychology in his discussion of the ego as defining a threshold between conscious and pre-conscious response pathways to internal and external sources of stimuli (Freud and Fliess 1954: 65–153). Like Unger, Freud was interested in what happens when the consciousness threshold is breached, but where Freud saw this as the origin of neurotic and psychotic conditions, Unger believed that it could provide a pathway to a different aspect of reality that is shut off from normally functioning consciousness. In addition to Fechner’s pioneering work in psychophysics, Unger’s other major influence comes from the phenomenological psychology of Franz Brentano (1838–1917), perhaps best known today as the teacher of Edmund Husserl (and also Freud, among a number of other important students).6 Brentano’s phenomenological psychology is intimately connected to Fechner’s psychophysics and is addressed to the same problem, namely, the relationship between consciousness and the body in the unitary living organism. Where Fechner saw consciousness and body as parallel aspects of a single reality, Brentano saw consciousness as an active participant in the production of its objects, realizing the meaningful content, the perceivability so to speak, of the perceived object. Brentano began as a scholar of Aristotle and the idea that the eye, for example, actualizes the greenness of a leaf was key to Aristotle’s theory of how the embodied animal soul relates to the external world. For Aristotle, greenness is not an abstract universal that exists apart from leaves and other green things, but rather it is a concrete universal 164

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present in both the leaf and the eye. This idea was what lay behind Brentano’s concept of the ‘intentionality’ of all conscious acts. For Brentano, the intentional object of consciousness ‘inexists’ in consciousness, that is to say, it actually exists in consciousness, which in its very essence is the matrix for all possible real objects. Unger was particularly influenced by the development of Brentano’s ideas in the work of Brentano’s student Alexius Meinong. Meinong argued that consciousness relates to the ‘sobeing’ (Sosein) of an object (the greenness of a leaf) that may or may not have real being (Sein) (an imaginary leaf versus an existent leaf). So-being refers to how some object might appear; it is a sort of potential object, and, according to Meinong, it is mind-independent (Jacquette 2008). Meinong dispenses with Brentano’s claim that the intentional objects ‘in-exists’, arguing rather that consciousness can be directed towards abstract objects like greenness that subsist in their own right even when they are not grasped by consciousness or instantiated by physical objects (like a leaf). Unger will put Meinong and Fechner together and argue that the real being—the bodily being, in other words—of a living organism is the ongoing transformation of the sobeing (Sosein) of a species type (tigerness, for example) into a concrete psychophysical unity (a living tiger). Unger calls this species-type the ‘all-at-once causal generation’ (einmalig kausale Genese) or ‘construction-cause’ (Konstruktions-Ursache) of the organism. The all-at-once causal generation stands in contrast to the type of causality that operates at the level of the body’s recurring biological cycles, the type of causality that is found in the sequence of changes leading from one stage in the cycle to the next. The body’s allat-once causality is the construction-cause [Konstruktions-Ursache] that operates not merely, as one might naively suspect, the way a single cause does, at the very ‘beginning’ of the fabrication process. Being the causa of the pre-pattern [Vorzeichnung] of this process, all-at-once causality operates transversally [quer], each moment as a concentratingcausality [Konzentrations-Ursache]. (1989: 19) The ‘all-at-once’ causality of the ‘construction-cause’ is not something that is an element within the temporal sequence of biological processes that maintain the organism in its physiological functioning. It runs ‘transversally’ (quer) through the entire sequence, operating as a sort ‘prepattern’, giving a centripetal focus to the multiplicity of ‘cyclic-biological’ events taking place in every cell of the organism. According to this model of the unity of the living organism, consciousness plays a rather significant role, namely, providing the intentional activity by means of which a species-typical Sosein or ‘pre-pattern’ maintains itself in its psychophysical Sein. The organic unity of every living being arises from a source where each element of the organism finds its place in a whole whose structure is prefigured as an ‘all-at-once reality of all the separate forces’ [Realität des Aufein-Mal aller beteiligten Kräfte]: Each force acts as if there were an all-at-once reality of all the separate forces that had been there before any one of them existed separately, a reality of a prior togetherness that assigns the forces their separate roles and orders their arrangement—as if each force right at the very start, at its first moment of origin, had experienced the action and influence of all the other forces—in this way they all spring forth ordered immediately and their balance operates organically. (1989: 8)

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Unger, of course, acknowledged the fact that every organism is a physical object in space and time and therefore part of a prior causal chain that goes backwards to its immediate progenitors and ultimately to members of prior species on the organism’s phylogenetic tree. But Unger’s construction-cause of the organism, what today is called the ‘autopoietic’ functioning of the organism, is not explicable solely on the basis of this causal chain. The self-organizing activities of the organism’s construction-cause involve the ‘psychic’ or conscious side of the psychophysical organism. Fechner had argued that consciousness can exist below the threshold of awareness, and Unger argued that the way that every organism constructs itself by means of its species-typical interaction with the qualitative differences in its environment—even the phototropism of a bacterium, for example—involves some level of consciousness. Consciousness allows the organism to be viewed not merely as a product of physical processes but as an active shaper of itself as a unitary being across its lifetime, interacting with its environment through its sensory-motor system and adjusting its behaviour in order to actualize a species-typical model of its ideal functioning condition. Such self-adjusting behaviour constitutes the organism’s physiological health and it is inseparable from consciousness. Unger will argue in his posthumously published Das Lebendige und das Göttliche that ‘“to be alive” [Leben] means in a certain sense “to live through” [Erleben], that is, to have conscious experience and enjoyment [bewusstes Erfahren und Geniessen]’ (1966: 117). This dynamic concept of physiological healthy functioning as having a necessary relationship to the felt experience [Erlebnis] of the whole organism was based, as I have said, upon Brentano’s phenomenological psychology. This holism became quite influential in the work of Gestalt psychologists at the University of Berlin around Wolfgang Köhler, and Unger was drawn to Köhler and his new holistic model of psychophysical self-organization. To summarize, psychophysics and phenomenological psychology provided the basic framework for Unger’s rehabilitation of the mythic imagination. Where Kant had limited the spontaneous or active faculty of the mind to its power to organize and cognize a qualitatively inchoate manifold that is given to consciousness through the senses, Fechner, Brentano and Meinong suggested that consciousness could activate the latent perceptibility, the so-being, of things themselves. Psychophysics and phenomenology placed consciousness into direct and active relationship not only with the objects of the external world, but with a world that might be realized in space and time, a possibility for a new species-type, or perhaps a new way for the speciestype to be activated. The living organism is the active self-creation of a species-typical, holistic consciousness out of the material conditions of its own organic materiality and the materiality of the surrounding environment. An altered and heightened consciousness might be able to connect with new ways to shape the body’s materiality and new ways to interact with the materiality of the surrounding world. That was Unger’s basic hypothesis, the hypothesis he hoped would be tested in ‘experiments in philosophy’ involving altered states of consciousness. For Unger, then, the organism’s uninterrupted self-creating activity meant, in the case of the human organism, that consciousness may be able to expand into and activate uncharted realms of reality beyond the Fechnerian threshold of ‘normal’ human perception. And, furthermore, such an expanded consciousness implied the existence of active biological forces undergirding the psychophysical organism that went untapped in the course of everyday life. Our breathing makes possible the intercellular energy transfers that are necessary for normal life, for example, but an expert practitioner of yoga—his closest friend and collaborator Oskar Goldberg actually studied with one in Tibet—is able to use his breathing to bring those intercellular processes under conscious control and reduce his energy needs to a bare minimum. Thus, Unger concluded that the mythic imagination could in fact be connected with energic forces in our bodies that had once been available to archaic humans but that the modern techno-scientific mind had

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allowed to atrophy, focusing as it does on the manipulation of physical forces within inorganic matter rather than on tapping the biological forces of our own bodies. The rehabilitation of the mythic imagination, then, was intended to be nothing less than a reversal of philosophy’s direction since Parmenides, redirecting it toward its excluded Other as the source of a new vitality after what seemed to be a millennia-long pursuit after sterile abstractions divorced from any living, sensorial matrix. The goal was now to use the mythic imagination to discover sensorially rich possibilities of not-yet-real forms of life from out of which a new cosmos could be constructed, one that better fit the human species than the impoverished reality of techno-scientific modernity. In the archaic world, the mythic imagination had realized such expanded cosmic possibilities—making contact with what it identified as the spirits of animals or with departed ancestors or the gods, for example—in and through the ritual activities of a small group at a specific cultic centre. Through these rituals, the group brought these imagined beings into reality, as much reality as their own psychophysical being possesses. Ethnographic accounts of what were then called Naturvölker (peoples of nature) reported that ritual practitioners such as shamans claimed to become the spirits or ancestors they communicated with, and the Hebrew Bible, according to Oskar Goldberg, described how God Himself entered into the midst of the encamped Israelites at the tent of meeting in the desert when the priest Aaron performed the appropriate sacrificial rites (Goldberg 2005; Rosenstock 2017). Unger and Goldberg credited these ethnographic reports as well as the written documents of ancient mythologies, including the Hebrew Bible, with ontological validity. The intentional objects of mythic thinking—spirits, gods, even or perhaps especially the God of the Israelites—were virtualities awaiting realization in and through the psychophysical activities of a particular worshipping collective. In the modern world, a rehabilitation of mythic thinking might be able to realize a species-wide form of life for all humanity and not just for a single people gathered at their cultic centre. Goldberg devoted his magnum opus, Die Wirklichkeit der Hebräer (1925) to showing how the Hebrew Bible provides a blueprint for just such a renewal of a planetary form of the mythic imagination. Unger worked out the philosophical grounding for this programmatic goal in his magnum opus, Wirklichkeit, Mythos, Erkenntnis (1930). Because of its roots in Meinong’s Gegenstandstheorie, Unger’s thought resonates with some developments in modern philosophy, especially the neo-realism of thinkers like Graham Harman, Markus Gabriel, Maurizio Ferraris and Tristan Garcia among several others.7 But I would argue that the closest parallel to Unger’s thought can be found in the recent so-called ‘ontological turn’ in anthropology. When the anthropologist Miho Ishii writes that his work studies ‘how magical, divine, or sacred worlds (hereafter called ‘divine worlds’) can be created, visualized, and lived by people’, and further claims that ‘divine worlds are created through concrete relations and actions among persons, things, spirits, and deities that take tangible as well as intangible forms’, he is articulating a position that fully expresses the ‘reality theory of myth’ of Goldberg and Unger (Ishii 2012: 371). One of the most well-known exponents of the ontological turn is Eduardo Kohn, and I will refer to his work in the course of this chapter in order to flesh out some of Unger’s more abstract formulations. The explication of Unger’s theory of the mythic imagination, the basis of his ‘experiment in philosophy’, can most aptly begin with his treatment of the coming into being of the psychophysical structure shared by every member of the human species. Unger is of course quite familiar with Darwinian evolutionary theory and also with the discoveries in the 1880s of the cranial and postcranial skeletal remains of an extinct hominid species named after the site of the discoveries, the Neanderthal valley in Germany. But Unger argued that a consideration of any species in its psychophysical unity requires not only an examination of its phylogeny, but also of its experiential 167

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structure, its shaping of internal and external stimuli into an integral whole. The construction-cause of the organism is the principle that guides ontogeny, the coming into being of the organism as a mature, functioning creature. Phylogeny can account for how a new ontogenic principle comes into being but it cannot account for what that ontogenic principle does, which is to uniquely configure organic matter into an experiential centre of consciousness, the centre of a unique ‘life world’. For Unger, the coming into being of the human organism’s life world begins with language. Unger claimed that whatever evolutionary antecedents the human species may have had, the uniqueness of the human as a psychophysical organism must rest in its capacity to use language and language-based thinking as its primary modality for interacting with its social and natural environment. Other hominid species certainly possessed conscious experience, as all organisms do to a certain extent, but only humans organize experience in and through language. Unger therefore argued in his earliest exposition of his logic of the mythic imagination, in the 1921 Gegen die Dichtung, that the origin of human language must be examined from the perspective of the human ‘construction-cause’, that is, the way that the psychophysical boundary is constructed in the human being. This boundary, as I mentioned above, separates consciousness from the sub-threshold level of consciousness where internal and external stimuli do not rise to the level of attentive and wakeful awareness. Because the structure of the boundary and its ongoing functioning is species-typical, consciousness is what preserves the unity across time of the psychophysical organism as an individual member of the species. Of course, each separate organism inflects this species-typical capacity for conscious experience in its own individual manner. ‘The “awakening” [Erwachen] of consciousness’, Unger claims in his later book Das Lebendige und das Göttliche, in every case appears to be conditioned upon its individualization, and in a certain sense being an individual is synonymous with being conscious, or at least with being wakefully conscious, and accordingly individuation may have graduated stages so that a protozoon may be less individual than higher forms of life. (1966: 126) Ontogeny (the coming into being of a unique individual form of life) is the purpose of all phylogeny (inheritable changes in the forms of species that are inheritable). Ontogeny reaches its most complete expression with anthropogenesis, the coming into being of a consciousness able to create its life world through the use of language. At first, the user of language was not a single individual, but the human species itself speaking through the individual. Human language, Unger thus claimed, emerged at this critical interface the species-typical structure of consciousness and the individual human being, at the boundary where potential experience becomes concretized as this stretch of individual conscious life. This is the key to Unger’s theory of the origin of language and of his theory of the mythic imagination, which is nothing other than the logic of supra-individual experience, species-typical experience, becoming concretized in a specific individual. Unger argues that the origin of language does not lie, as might have been assumed, in the individual human’s relationship to external objects. Rather, it lies at the inner boundary between wakeful individual consciousness and sub-threshold supraindividual consciousness, the realm where the most imaginative and fantastic creations of the mind emerge, as in dreams and hallucinatory experiences, when the relation to the outer world is least significant. Unger writes: Is the initial condition of language achieved by means of the primitive development of primitive perceptions? Do we need to go hunting for clues of this initial condition among 168

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the simplest, the most thing-like, the most intense, the most basic sensory impressions? Is it hunger, seizing prey, pain, hunting, battle, woman, that make up the region where the origins of the will to language lie, the lowest level of drives and sensory experiences? And is everything that is immaterial, lacking in forceful pressure, and inside of us, only a late development of a language already in existence, and built upon analogies with things outside of us that can be grasped? […] Or is this whole region only able to be understood as a later development, and does the region of everything psychic [geistige], fully formed from the earliest moment, come first to be expressed and only thereafter the material and the external aspect of what exists? (1925: 57) The origin of the full richness of human language, then, cannot be discovered by tracing it back in time to simpler and simpler forms of language, back to gestural language in a precursor hominid species, for example, but it requires that the origin be a constitutive moment when the constructive psychic structure unique to humanity emerges. This moment, since it is constitutive of the human species as unique type of hominid, emerges ‘all at once’ (einmalig) and is repeated with every human birth. As the constitutive aspect (the construction-cause) of the human species as such, the supra-individual psychic structure contains the fullness of potentialities whose unfolding will not represent a progressive growth of human language from primitive to complex, but rather a differentiation of an originary fullness of potentiality into various empirical languages and also into different types of discourse within each language. Unger’s conception of the origin of language as lying within the sub-threshold level of consciousness where the species-typical structures of individual experience are found is meant to contest the Kantian stricture against transcendental experience, the encounter with things in themselves. Kant had conceived of experience as by necessity that of an individual consciousness, but Unger suggests that consciousness emerges from a realm where consciousness is supra-individual in form and the objects of this consciousness correspond to the supraindividual higher-order genera that may or may not be ‘fulfilled’ (erfüllt), to use the technical term that Unger takes from Meinong, in the concrete objects of normal experience. Unger, again following Meinong, assumes that the intentional object of consciousness is a ‘meaning content’ (Bedeutungsinhalt) and that this content is expressed in language. What this means, Unger says, is that ‘there must be a language-propensity [Spracheignung] of the first realities [Wesenheiten] and a “retinal film” [Netzhaut] for speech’ (1925: 78). These ‘first realities’ are the potential forms of individual experience. Unger insists, as we have seen, that the first realities that consciousness grasps as its objects are not the most primitive aspects of human life, those that are required for sheer biological survival, but rather the totality of meaning contents as such, the world insofar as it has a ‘language propensity’, insofar as it is turned toward human consciousness as such, toward the supra-individual form of human consciousness. These first realities are meaning-contents that can come into expression as language. Indeed, each empirical language simply is the individualization of these intentional meaning-objects as vocalized realities. And, what is more, the content of the earliest human languages was, Unger claims, the narrative of the coming into being of these ‘first realities’, their fulfilment as embodied wordrealities. Thus, Unger concludes, the origin of language is coeval with cosmogonic mythology. And cosmogonic mythology is coeval with a human collective becoming conscious of itself as a part of an all-inclusive environment, an environment including unfolding generic possibilities as well as concrete individuals. This unfolding is the group’s ontogeny, its coming into being as the specific group it is, with the specific language it uses for its myths. Its language is coextensive with its cosmos because both are aspects of a single continuously unfolding reality. 169

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The contemporary anthropologist Eduardo Kohn studies the cosmos of the Runa tribe in Ecuador’s Upper Amazon rain forest in his book How Forests Think (2013). Kohn speaks about how the Runa’s language contain certain words that are iconic of the thing or process they name, like tsupu for the name of the event of something plunging into the river. Kohn does not take these iconic words to be somehow primitive and representing an early stage in the Quichua, the Runa’s language, but rather these words are the anchors of a language that in its entirety is felt by the Runa to allow them to communicate with and affect the objects and processes that constitute the world of the forest. The world around the Runa, we could say, has a ‘language propensity’, what Kohn, relying upon the thought of Charles Sanders Pierce, calls the forest’s ‘semiotic quality’ (2013: 78). Kohn argues, following the Amerindian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, that there is a logic to the continuous emergence of the world out of its ‘propensity’ to have meaning and enter into language. Kohn calls it a ‘living logic’ and it captures the manner that the spirit realm of possible animated selves enter into corporeal actuality. I would argue that Kohn’s living logic, which he derives from his study of the Runa, is exactly that logic of mythic thinking that Unger seeks to capture when he claims that the origin of human language lies in the transition, accessible to sub-threshold levels of consciousness, from supra-individual meaning contents into an embodied and therefore individuated consciousness with a particular perspective on the world. Kohn labels what Unger calls supra-individual meaning contents as ‘generals’, borrowing the term from Pierce. A general is a possibility for how a certain kind of material can be shaped, given the constraints of that material. Kohn refers to non-living generals like those that emerge from the flow of a river, such as whirlpools which emerge when ‘swift currents moving around obstructions create self-reinforcing circular patterns’. Whirlpools are embodiments of the general that we might call ‘river flow’ or ‘liquid flow’ because they are ‘a subset of all the possible (messier, less constrained, more turbulent) ways in which water might otherwise flow’ (2013: 159–60). When we are dealing with animated bodies, a speciestype is a general because it is a possibility of how the self-reinforcing flow of higher-order generals like breathing and nutrition can be shaped within the constraints of the organism’s materiality. Kohn calls a realized general a ‘form’ and Unger calls it a ‘form structure’ (1966: 175 and passim). Unger speaks about an organic form structure as the realization of possibilities of ‘leading a life’ (Lebensführing) in the animal’s relation to certain generic constraints, like ‘predation, speed, defense, land, water, air, and also the size of its population, whether it will have one, two or more young as its reproductive capacity which define an average population size’ (1966: 175–76). Organic forms or generals are potentialities for species, but there is a fluidity among these potentials such that several species might be viewed as variants of a single general. In Amerindian cosmology, it is exactly this single general type that exists in the realm of what the Runa call ‘the masters of the forest animals’. In the more generic perspective of these spirit masters, all the wild birds that the Runa hunt are in fact variants of the species-type of a domestic bird, the chicken, since the masters are the true owners of these variant species. What the Runa see as a gray-winged trumpeter, chachalaca, guan, or tinamou is really the spirit master’s chicken. Here too there is a hierarchy that assumes certain logical semiotic properties. All these wild birds, as the Runa experience them in the forest, are token instantiations of a more general type—the Chicken—as interpreted at a higher level. (Kohn 2013: 178–79)

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The spirit masters are ‘inside’ the realm of general possibilities, and therefore ‘the animals are always abundant there’ (2013: 179). Being inside the realm of virtualities, the spirit masters as well as the departed spirits of the dead who come to inhabit this realm are timeless, but also related to time as the continuous source of the proliferating life and concrete individual bodies of humans and non-human animals. Being themselves general, the spirit masters recognize the generic similarity of things that corporeal beings distinguish. In their language, ‘chicken’ relates to chickens not within a system of other names for birds, but as a direct expression of the general type chicken in exactly the way that tsupu names the process of plunging into water, no matter what specific thing is doing the plunging or for how long it takes. In this virtual language, then, every word is an icon of Unger’s meaning-content. One could also say that the spirit master’s perception of the bird requires less interpretive effort. Following Peirce’s insistence that the chain of semiotic interpretance always ends in iconism because it is only with iconism […] that the differences that would require further interpretation are no longer noticed (it is with iconism, that is, where mental effort ends), we could say that there is less interpretive effort required by the masters who see the forest birds just as they really are—as domestic chickens. (2013: 179) Without using the term ‘iconism’, Unger speaks of exactly the condition of the virtual language of the ‘first realities’ as the ‘onomatopoetics of thinking’. The words of ‘the’ language [‘der’ Sprache, GdD, 84] are expressions of a kind of thinking that is related to a ‘universality’ [Universalität], what Kohn calls a general. Onomatopoetic thinking relates to a universality in exactly the way that ‘a retinal excitation is the reproduction of an optical state of affairs’, in other words, it is more precisely a ‘sensation of universality’ (Unger 1925: 83). Onomatopoetic thinking is not word-thinking, but sentence-thinking, because the universality its intentionality captures is ‘a wholeness [Gesamtheit] of the linguistically possible [das Sprachmögliche] that is contained in a single expression’ (1925: 84). Onomatopoetic thinking’s linguistic possibilities are transferred over into the level of individuals, that is, the empirical level, in a broken form, divided into definite caesural places [Cäsurastellen] into what will later be called “grammatical forms”: into sentences and words of lesser wholeness, that then are further differentiated. (1925: 84) Before this breaking up of onomatopoetic thinking, Unger explains that the ‘inner’ and the ‘outer’ of the sensation of a universality are indistinguishable, unlike in the optical experience where the sensation and the object are clearly divided into ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ spheres. With the wholeness sense organ of thinking, the situation is quite different. This thinking lies before the division into individual senses or it contains them in a state of indifferentiation. This thinking’s products are identical to objective [first] realities, and it would therefore be necessary that thinking and being be in general [überhaupt] indistinguishable, with the resultant situation of a ‘life in the object’. (1925: 85) This life in the object of onomatopoetic thinking is a form of ‘being lost in the object’ [Verlorensein im Gegenstande]. The only way to get ‘outside’ this object is to break up the iconic wholenesses of 171

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linguistic possibilities into actual sentences and words in the differentiated structure of grammatical forms. Empirical language is ‘that which focuses consciousness upon that which is thought’, so that ‘thought can relate to itself’ (1925: 85). Thinking now takes place in the structures of complex sentences and with words that are no longer onomatopoetic (or for the most part are not). Such thinking takes time and builds wholes out of parts rather than senses wholes all at once. Thinking, at least in its initial stage, uses language to narrate way that universalities become individualized into existent corporeal forms. As I have said, this narrative is nothing less than a cosmogonic myth, but it is also the narration of the coming into being of the speaking subject (her ontogeny), the subject as a living individual speaker within a community of speakers—since each language is the way that the wholeness of the generic thinking subjectivity is concretely embodied not just in a single individual but in an entire lineage of individuals. When a group narrates a creation story, it necessarily narrates the story of its own creation, and both stories give expression to the ur-function of language itself, to let a world think itself into being. Unger’s goal is to understand the logic of this ur-function of language so that ‘what was brought forth spontaneously and in the manner of sleepwalking [nachtwandlerisch] in humanity’s ur-time, the future will bring forth once again; it must allow once again unempirical language to arise or perhaps to “see”, as the Vedas put it, an already existing language in the process of its arising’ (1925: 89). To accomplish this rebirth of cosmopoetic language, nothing less is necessary than ‘to make visible the non-empirical data of the origin of language’ (1925: 89). The task of a future thinking is, in other words, to discover the ‘universalities’ or, as Kohn puts it, the ‘generals’ that are dispersed throughout the individual existents of this world. The task is to think ‘inside’ the world, to encounter the iconicities within the differential complexities of both the world and language. Unger explains that Plato had jumped too quickly from individuals to the iconicity that is latent within them. Thus, the wholeness in which all individual trees participate in is, for Plato, the Tree Itself, the reality in which being a tree and treeness are united in such a way that the mind apprehends the universal and the singular at once. Individual trees are not as truly trees as is the Form of the Tree. ‘One can say that Plato failed to stabilize the reality of the universalities because he degraded the world of experience to a merely apparent world’ (1925: 181). The discovery of unitary self-sameness in a multiplicity of objects does not depend upon hypostasizing one object as really real and the others as imperfect imitations, but rather in showing how a single pattern can be transfigured into a variety of forms, the sort of analysis that topological mathematics does when it describes the way that a doughnut and a coffee cup can both be transformations of a single shape, the torus. ‘What is necessary’, Unger explains, is not to see the real universal as the reified concept of some given particular, but rather to understand the principles of transformation by which the unique property of a universal can give rise to correspondences among objects that do not lie open on the surface but must be discovered again and again in wholly distinct forms. (1925: 182) Unger offers the example of the way that Pythagoreans saw a relationship between twoness (or evenness) and femaleness, darkness, movement, and oblongness (the example is Unger’s). Each of these things is not an allegorical representation of twoness, but a wholly distinct form in which twoness is embodied. In a striking formulation, Unger says that ‘we can rightfully claim that not only spirit but reality is self-symbolizing’. Unger goes on to speak of the hieroglyphic meaning of reality itself, a situation that we usually identify as “spiritual”, as when something abstract (thoughts) is transformed into something concrete (images), in 172

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the language of dreams, for example, but this same condition obtains in reality itself as soon as the real meaning of “common” or “abstract” is fundamentally understood. (1925: 183) What Unger calls an ‘experiment in philosophy’ is the guided use of the imagination to enter inside self-symbolizing reality as it is in process of concretizing itself into the individual entities of the empirical world. Experimental philosophy is distinguished from the mythic imagination of the ur-time because it is neither ‘spontaneous’ nor the product of a ‘sleepwalking’ dream state. Eduardo Kohn describes his own ethnographic procedure in terms that are similar to what Unger is after when he says that he is ‘experimenting with ways of making the invisible “inside” [of the forest master’s forms] more apparent’ (2013: 187). Kohn compares his experimental ethnography with dreaming: I would like to suggest is that the semiotics of dreaming, understood in terms of the peculiar properties of form I have explored here, involves the spontaneous, self-organizing apperception and propagation of iconic associations in ways that can dissolve some of the boundaries we usually recognize between insides and outsides. (2013: 187) Getting inside the way that the ‘invisible inside’ of reality propagates what Unger calls ‘universalities’ or ‘real universals’ and what Kohn calls ‘generals’, what both men call ‘forms’, is not simply a matter of knowing reality differently than it is known in techno-scientific disciplines, it is also, and more importantly, a way of experimenting with reality differently, creating the conditions for the emergence of new experiences that, in the terms of the epistemological frame of techno-science, would be judged to be an ‘impossible experience’. The key to doing this is to enter inside the becoming of the inward experience of the human psychophysical organism using the method that Unger calls ‘concretion’. This method requires first of all overcoming the dichotomy of abstract and concrete, where abstraction is on the side of thinking and concreteness is on the side of the body and the senses. Thinking must begin with the kind of abstractions or generalities that can be followed as they become possible objects of sensation. But to do this, thinking must not start with abstractions that simply remove characteristics from the sensible particular, for example the abstraction ‘tree’ that abstracts from the shape of the leaf, the size of the trunk, the pattern of its branch formation, and so on. In this sort of abstraction, the abstraction is so much less than the concrete tree that it could never become the sensible tree. To think inside the becoming of the concrete tree it is necessary to start with an abstraction that is more than the concrete tree. Rather than removing characteristics from the tree, connections between the tree and other things must be established that allow for a more embracing totality out of which the concrete tree can emerge. This embracing totality is not less rich in specific characteristics than empirical reality but more so. Unger explains that imagination must generate ‘such a multiplicity of entities [Wesenheiten] that previously invisible and unconscious correspondences between imagined and real things are revealed to intuition’ (1925: 177). Unger characterizes the goal of this imaginative search for ‘invisible and unconscious correspondences’ as the grasping of such a wide swathe of reality in its coming to be [Enstehen] that it constitutes an entire experiential system [Erfahrungssystem] in its embryonic condition, a single undifferentiated givenness which, when it differentiates itself into the whole manifold of an experience, results in just such an horizonless fullness of facts that as this empirical realm possesses. (1930: 154)

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Penetrating to the point within one’s sub-threshold contact with the material conditions out of which consciousness emerges provides access to the source of an entirely new experiential system that lies latent or virtual within our own. To penetrate to this point requires that one shift one’s typical experiential focus, letting the shapes and contours of things blur, and allowing the underlying forms, what Eduardo Kohn calls generals and what Unger calls ‘real universals’ emerge into view. The imaginative and intuitive process of entering into the inward transformability and variability of sensible objects is only available to human consciousness, that is, to a consciousness that is capable of imagining the totality of given experience as having ‘empty spaces’ or ‘vacua’, the sites where experience as such emerges out of indifferentiation into clarity as ‘facts’. Only human consciousness, Unger would argue, can perceive the difference between entire states of consciousness, such as dreaming and waking, and can even manipulate such states in directed dreaming and in refocusing wakeful attentiveness in ways that were studied by phenomenological psychology. What Unger calls the ‘experiment in philosophy’ is one such totalizing refocusing of consciousness. Its goal is not merely to get behind sensible particulars to the transformation of real universals as they are concretized, but to actually bring about a changed condition in reality itself. This changed condition must begin in the one part of reality to which human consciousness has direct connection, the body of the individual. As the ethnography of ancient and current ritual practitioners demonstrate, changes in an individual body take place within the context of changes in the bodies of the collective of which the individual is a part. Experimental philosophy, therefore, begins its transformation of reality by working on the psychophysical structures of individuals and collectives. But the objects with which humans deal are also transformed, as for example happens with ritual objects handled by shamans or other religious practitioners. In such religions, what Unger calls ‘experimental religions’, ritual artefacts are inseparable from the work of self-transformation that the imagination brings about. Describing a ritual involving the possession of a young girl by a goddess, the anthropologist Miho Ishii whom I quoted at the beginning of this essay writes that the young girl ‘dances, walks, speaks, and breathes in relation to the actions of others, which, aside from humans, include sacred objects and paraphernalia. These actions are inevitably impromptu to a degree, since they emerge through the encounters between several bodies and things. Thus, the contingency involved in the ritual performance makes the ritual not merely the realization or representation of one predictable/possible alternative reality, but the momentary actualization of the virtual state of the world’ (Ishii 2012: 384). Unger’s experimental philosophy seeks nothing less than a more than momentary ‘actualization of the virtual state of the world’. The reason it does so, as Unger explains in Wirklichkeit Mythos Erkenntnis, is that the current condition of reality ‘restricts humanity to a catastrophic condition’ (1930: 70). The constraints and suffering of natural existence and the massive disasters that always threaten, have led human beings to want to bring global justice into harmony with the real conditions of their broken worlds and lives. There are only two ways to accomplish this: to search for justice somewhere beyond reality or to attempt to set up practical and concrete processes to work against the tendency of natural existence. The first leads to the religions where miracles happened once before and are only objects of belief; the second leads to religions that experiment in the production of miracles in this world. (1930: 70–71) Unger’s experimental philosophy, basing itself on the capacity of the imagination to access the site where new experiential systems can be brought into being, claims to offer the blueprint for 174

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a new ‘uncatastrophic’ order of human consciousness in its power to alter its own organic nature as a social species. This new order of collective existence arises from altered forms of consciousness at the level where individual consciousness intersects with the species-wide ‘construction principle’. To gain access to these new individual-collective states of consciousness is the task of Unger’s new experimental philosophy. Just how this new form of consciousness might create the conditions for a new ‘metaphysical politics’ is the subject of Unger’s Politik und Metaphysik, the book that Benjamin thought was ‘the most significant piece of writing on politics in our time’. To examine experimental philosophy’s connection to metaphysical politics is beyond the purview of this essay. I hope, however, to have shown the continuing relevance of Unger’s theory of the mythic imagination and its significance in the history of phenomenological thought more generally. Drawing upon his study of altered states of consciousness in psychology and ethnology, and linking this to a Meinongian theory of the reality of ‘fictional’ objects, Unger provides an account of thinking as simultaneously mythopoesis and anthropogenesis that allows us to understand not only ‘how forests think’, something the anthropologist Eduardo Kohn says Amerindian natives understand, but to understand how the cosmos thinks. Perhaps this will open a path to what H. G. Adler, Unger’s closest disciple, called an ‘experimental theology’, one that finally expressed the reality of the whole human species. That, certainly, was Unger’s hope.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

For a general discussion of Unger’s philosophical output, see Voigts (1992: 45–63) and Rosenstock (2017: 95–104). For a discussion of Benjamin’s interest in the psychophysical problem in the years just before his encounter with Unger, see Steiner (2001: 463–90). Besides the sections in the books mentioned in footnote 2 above, the fullest treatment of Unger’s theory of the mythic imagination is in Schüring (1965: 493–510). For an overview of Adler’s life and works, see Filkins (2018). For Adler’s recollections of Unger and his impact upon him, see Adler (1960: 182–85); for his Ungerinspired philosophical work, see Adler (1987). For a general introduction to Brentano and his students Husserl and Meinong, see Rollinger (2013). For a discussion of neo-realism and some of the variations in its expression, see Garcia (2013).

References Adler, H. G. (1960) Erinnerungen an den Philosophen Erich Unger, Eckart 3: 182–185. Adler, H. G. (1987) Vorschule für eine Experimentaltheologie: Betrachtungen über Wirklichkeit und Sein, Stuttgart: Steiner. Benjamin, W. (1994) The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 1910–1940, (eds.) G. Scholem and T. W. Adorno, (trans.) M. R. Jacobson and E. M. Jacobson, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Benjamin, W. (2002) Gesammelte Schriften, (ed.) R. Tiedemann, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Fechner, G. T. (1860) Elemente der Psychophysik, Leipzig: Breitkopf and Härtel. Fenves, P. (2011) The Messianic Reduction: Walter Benjamin and the Shape of Time, Stanford, CA.: Stanford University Press. Filkins, P. (2018) H.G. Adler: A Life in Many Worlds, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Freud, S., and W. Fliess (1954) The Origins of Psycho-Analysis: Letters to Wilhelm Fliess, Drafts and Notes, 1887–1902, New York: Basic Books. Garcia, T. (2013) Crossing Ways of Thinking: On Graham Harman’s System and My Own, Parrhesia 16: 14–25. Goldberg, O. (2005) Die Wirklichkeit Der Hebräer, (ed.) M. Voigts, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. Ishii, M. (2012) Acting with Things: Self-Poiesis, Actuality, and Contingency in the Formation of Divine Worlds, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 2.2: 371–388.

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Bruce Rosenstock Jacquette, D. (2008) Object Theory Logic and Mathematics: Two Essays by Ernst Mally, History and Philosophy of Logic 29.2: 167–182. 10.1080/01445340802011164. Kohlenbach, M. (2005) Religion, Experience, Politics: On Erich Unger and Walter Benjamin, in M. Kohlenbach and R. Geuss (eds.), The Early Frankfurt School and Religion, Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 64–84. Kohn, E. (2013) How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human, Berkeley: University of California Press. Rollinger, R. D. (2013) Austrian Phenomenology: Brentano, Husserl, Meinong, and Others on Mind and Object, Berlin: de Gruyter. Rosenstock, B. (2017) Transfinite Life: Oskar Goldberg and the Vitalist Imagination, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Schüring, H.-J. (1965) Der Mythos als Seinsgrund der Erkenntnis, Zeitschrift Für Philosophische Forschung 19.3: 493–510. Steiner, U. (2001) Von Bern nach Muri: Vier Unveröffentlichte Briefe Walter Benjamins an Paul Häberlin Im Kontext, Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 75.3: 463–490. Unger, E. (1922) Der Psychophysiologische Problem Und Sein Arbeitsgebiet. Eine Methologische Einleitung, Diss. phil., Universität Erlangen. Unger, E. (1925) Gegen die Dichtung: eine Begründung des Konstruktionsprinzip in der Erkenntnis, Leipzig: Verlag von Felix Meiner. Unger, E. (1930) Wirklichkeit Mythos Erkenntnis, München and Berlin: Verlag von R. Oldenbourg. Unger, E. (1966) Das Lebendige und das Göttliche, Jerusalem: Hatehiya Press. Unger, E. (1989) Erich Unger: Politik und Metaphysik, (ed.) M. Voigts. Würzburg: Königshausen and Neumann. Voigts, M. (1992) Oskar Goldberg, der mythische Experimentalwissenschaftler: ein verdrängtes Kapitel jüdischer Geschichte, Berlin: Agora.

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PART IV

Bodies of thought and habits of thinking from Plato to Irigaray

13 THINKING ABOUT THE UNTHINKABLE Hypothesizing the khôra in the Timaeus Luc Brisson

1 Introduction Thinking about the khôra in the Timaeus1 means thinking about the unthinkable, for the three following reasons: the khôra cannot be grasped either by sense-perception or the intellect, and therefore is ‘illegitimate’ as an object of thought; there was no witness present when the khôra was ordered by the demiurge; and the khôra, as anagkê in our world, is linked to randomness, as opposed to ‘intelligent design’. The difficulty of the task necessitates a careful reading and commenting on some paradoxical passages in the Timaeus.

2 Hypothesizing the khôra in the Timaeus Khôra plays a strategic role in the Timaeus, but it remains an enigmatic genos.

a Why the khôra? Plato defends a philosophical doctrine characterized by a twofold ontological revolution. (1) The world of things perceived by the senses, and in which we live, is an image of a world of intelligible realities (or Forms) which, as the models of sensible things, constitute genuine being, because, unlike sensible things, Forms possess their principle of existence within themselves. (2) Man cannot be reduced to his body, and his genuine identity coincides with what we designate by means of the term ‘soul’—whatever may be the definition proposed of this entity—which accounts, not only in human beings but also in the totality of the world, for all motion, both material (growth, locomotion, etc.) and immaterial (feelings, sense perception, intellectual knowledge, etc.). Throughout the history of philosophy, this twofold reversal has enabled the specificity of Platonism to be defined. Here, I will take only the first reversal into account, according to which the sensible things that surround us are mere images of which the intelligible forms are the models (Brisson 2001: 55–85). This hypothesis implies that sensible things are both similar and dissimilar to their models. In the Timaeus, the demiurge accounts for the similarity, and the khôra explains the dissimilarity. The causal order, manifested in the sensible, is the result of the activity of a god (28b–c), that is, the demiurge, who fashions the universe by setting a primitive chaos in order. That story is told in the Timaeus. 179

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After an introduction (27c–29d) in which the presuppositions are listed, we turn to the description of what has been fashioned by a character called the ‘demiurge’ (29d–47e) and of the status of ‘khôra’ and of necessity (47e–69a), to conclude with the cooperation of reason and necessity (69a–92c) as far as the fashioning of human beings and animals is concerned. The dialogue ends with a hymn to the world (92c). Yet how does one make the assumption of the khôra as a third genos?

b How can one talk about the khôra? How can one talk about the khôra? We find an answer to this question in 50a4–c6: I must make one more effort to describe it, more clearly still. Suppose you were molding gold into every shape there is, going on non-stop remolding one shape into the next. If someone then were to point at one of them and ask you, ‘What is it?’, your safest answer by far, with respect to truth, would be to say, ‘gold’, but never ‘triangle’ or any of the other shapes that come to be in the gold, as though it is these, because they change even while you are making the statement. However, that answer, too, should be satisfactory, as long as the shapes are willing to accept ‘what is such’ as someone’s designation. This has a degree of safety. Now the same account, in fact, holds also for that nature which receives all the bodies. We must always refer to it by the same term, for it does not depart from its own character in any way. Not only does it always receive all things, it has never in any way whatever taken on any characteristic similar to any of the things that enter it. Its nature is to be available for anything to make its impression upon, and it is modified, shaped and reshaped by the things that enter it. There are the things that make it appear different at different times. The things that enter and leave it are imitations of those things that always are, imprinted after their likeness in a marvelous way that is hard to describe. This is something we shall pursue at another time.2

ἔτι δὲ σαφέστερον αὐτοῦ πέρι προθυμητέον αὖθις εἰπεῖν. εἰ γὰρ πάντα τις σχήματα πλάσας ἐκ χρυσοῦ μηδὲν μεταπλάττων παύοιτο ἕκαστα εἰς ἅπαντα, δεικνύντος δή τινος αὐτῶν ἓν καὶ ἐρομένου τί ποτ’ ἐστί, μακρῷ πρὸς ἀλήθειαν ἀσφαλέστατον εἰπεῖν ὅτι χρυσός, τὸ δὲ τρίγωνον ὅσα τε ἄλλα σχήματα ἐνεγίγνετο, μηδέποτε λέγειν ταῦτα ὡς ὄντα, ἅ γε μεταξὺ τιθεμένου μεταπίπτει, ἀλλ’ ἐὰν ἄρα καὶ τὸ τοιοῦτον μετ’ ἀσφαλείας ἐθέλῃ δέχεσθαί τινος, ἀγαπᾶν. ὁ αὐτὸς δὴ λόγος καὶ περὶ τῆς τὰ πάντα δεχομένης σώματα φύσεως. ταὐτὸν αὐτὴν ἀεὶ προσρητέον·ἐκ γὰρ τῆς ἑαυτῆς τὸ παράπαν οὐκ ἐξίσταται δυνάμεως—δέχεταί τε γὰρ ἀεὶ τὰ πάντα, καὶ μορφὴν οὐδεμίαν ποτὲ οὐδενὶ τῶν εἰσιόντων ὁμοίαν εἴληφεν οὐδαμῇ οὐδαμῶς ἐκμαγεῖον γὰρ φύσει παντὶ κεῖται, κινούμενόν τε καὶ διασχηματιζόμενον ὑπὸ τῶν εἰσιόντων, φαίνεται δὲ δι’ ἐκεῖνα ἄλλοτε ἀλλοῖον—τὰ δὲ εἰσιόντα καὶ ἐξιόντα τῶν ὄντων ἀεὶ μιμήματα, τυπωθέντα ἀπ’ αὐτῶν τρόπον τινὰ δύσφραστον καὶ θαυμαστόν, ὃν εἰς αὖθις μέτιμεν.

This passage draws conclusions from a very difficult argument that has given rise to many translations and interpretations.3 1.

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The Forms, which are in themselves immutable and eternal, can be designated by the deictics ‘this’ and ‘that’. For their part, the sensible particulars subject to becoming, which never cease to change, can only be apprehended through the formula ‘that which is suchand-such’ (see Chesi 2016). The khôra, which is the receptacle of all sensible things, is immutable and eternal like the Forms, but completely unspecified. This is why, like the Forms, it can be designated by the deictics ‘this’ or ‘that’. 180

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Its indeterminacy is illustrated by means of three comparisons with gold (50a4–b5), on which figures are imprinted, with perfumes (50e4–8), and with soft materials—wax for instance (50e8–51a1) (Lee 1971; Mohr 1985). Unlike the intelligible, which is completely determinate, the khôra must be completely indeterminate in order to integrally preserve the identity of the sensible things it receives and which enter and leave it. We thus arrive at this conclusion, which is so paradoxical for sound common sense (51a7–b2). Like the intelligible, which alone can be said to be ‘this’ or ‘that’, the khôra is invisible and bereft of form (ἀνόρατον εἶδός τι καὶ ἄμορφον); this is why it participates in the intelligible in a particularly disconcerting way (μεταλαμβάνον δὲ ἀπορώτατά πῃ τοῦ νοητοῦ), and does not allow itself to be easily grasped (δυσαλωτότατον).

c How can one think about the khôra? Forms, intelligible, incorporeal, universal, and immutable, are grasped by the intellect (52a1–4). Bodies, which are in a process of becoming, are grasped by the senses, accompanied by opinion (52a4–7). Then there is the khôra (52a8–b5), which can only be ‘apprehended by a kind of bastard reasoning’ (ἁπτὸν λογισμῷ τινι νόθῳ), in a way similar to a dream (52b3), when illusory images are seen. But, in the case of the khôra, which cannot be grasped by the senses, what is attained is not an illusion (52b6–c2), but a hypothesis that is necessary as a consequence of another one, that of the intelligible. Although one can, of course, challenge the validity of these hypotheses, one must admit that the deductions whose axioms they constitute feature a rigor that even modern and contemporary cosmologies cannot deny them (see Brisson and Meyerstein 2014). Plato explains in 52a8–d1: And the third type is khôra, which exists always and cannot be destroyed. It provides a location for all things that come to be. It is itself apprehended by a kind of bastard reasoning that does not involve sense perception, and it is hardly even an object of belief. We look at it as in a dream, when we say that everything that exists must of necessity be somewhere, in some place and occupying some space, and that that which doesn’t exist somewhere, whether on earth or heaven, doesn’t exist at all. We prove unable to draw all these distinctions and others related to them—even in the case of that unsleeping, truly existing reality—because our dreaming state renders us incapable of waking up and stating the truth, which is this: Since that for which an image has come to be does not belong to the image itself, which is invariably borne along to picture something else, it stands to reason that the image should therefore come to be in something else, somehow clinging to being, or else be nothing at all. But that which really is receives support from the accurate, true account—that as long as the one is distinct from the other, neither of them ever comes to be in the other in such a way that they at the same time become one and the same, and also two.

Let us analyse this passage (see Cherniss 1977b). 181

τρίτον δὲ αὖ γένος ὂν τὸ τῆς χώρας ἀεί, φθορὰν οὐ προσδεχόμενον, ἕδραν δὲ παρέχον ὅσα ἔχει γένεσιν πᾶσιν, αὐτὸ δὲ μετ’ ἀναισθησίας ἁπτὸν λογισμῷ τινι νόθῳ, μόγις πιστόν, πρὸς ὃ δὴ καὶ ὀνειροπολοῦμεν βλέποντες καί φαμεν ἀναγκαῖον εἶναί που τὸ ὂν ἅπαν ἔν τινι τόπῳ καὶ κατέχον χώραν τινά, τὸ δὲ μήτ’ ἐν γῇ μήτε που κατ’ οὐρανὸν οὐδὲν εἶναι. αῦτα δὴ πάντα καὶ τούτων ἄλλα ἀδελφὰ καὶ περὶ τὴν ἄυπνον καὶ ἀληθῶς φύσιν ὑπάρχουσαν ὑπὸ ταύτης τῆς ὀνειρώξεως οὐ δυνατοὶ γιγνόμεθα ἐγερθέντες διοριζόμενοι τἀληθὲς λέγειν, ὡς εἰκόνι μέν, ἐπείπερ οὐδ’ αὐτὸ τοῦτο ἐφ’ ᾧ γέγονεν ἑαυτῆς ἐστιν, ἑτέρου δέ τινος ἀεὶ φέρεται φάντασμα, διὰ ταῦτα ἐν ἑτέρῳ προσήκει τινὶ γίγνεσθαι, οὐσίας ἁμωσγέπως ἀντεχομένην, ἢ μηδὲν τὸ παράπαν αὐτὴν εἶναι, τῷ δὲ ὄντως ὄντι βοηθὸς ὁ δι’ ἀκριβείας ἀληθὴς λόγος, ὡς ἕως ἄν τι τὸ μὲν ἄλλο ᾖ, τὸ δὲ ἄλλο, οὐδέτερον ἐν οὐδετέρῳ ποτὲ γενόμενον ἓν ἅμα ταὐτὸν καὶ δύο γενήσεσθον.

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The khôra is characterized as a γένος (Miller 2003) in the broad sense of the term, and not in the technical Aristotelian meaning. In fact, it is a third type of ‘realities’. Like the other two types of ‘realities’, Forms and bodies, it exists for all time, and it cannot be destroyed, nor is it fashioned by the demiurge, who can only act on the sensible particulars that are within the khôra. The khôra provides a location for all bodies. In ancient Greek, the term ‘khôra’ designates a territory, or land. More precisely, it is the countryside, from which food is derived, as opposed to the city,4 and more abstractly, it is space or place (Algra 1995). The term khôra is not defined in the Timaeus, but is illustrated by means of metaphors that are not only spatial, but also constitutive (Brisson 2015). The spatial aspect is linked to these nouns: ὑποδοχή (49a6, 51a5, 73a3), χώρα (52a8, b4, d3, 53a6, 57c1, 58a7, 79d6, 83a4), τόπος (57c3, 6, 60c1, 62d7), ἔδρα (52b1, 53a2, 59a3) and to these verbs: ἐκδεξόνενον [ἐν] (50e5), ἐνεγίγνετο (50b3), ἀπομάττειν [ἐν] (50c8–9); while the substantive aspect is linked to these nouns: τροφός (88d6), τιθήνη (88d6), μήτηρ (50d3), and to this verb and these nouns: μεταπλάττειν (50a6), ἐκμαγεῖον (50c2), ἐκτύπωμα (50d4, 6). So the khôra is not only that in which (en) are the elements, but that of which they are made (ek) (Botter 2003). Moreover, this is why there is no void in the khôra and why sensible particulars are discrete. This is very important, because the Timaeus deals not with geometry, but with physics. This is why Aristotle associates khôra with matter (hulê). Even if khôra is very different from matter (see Brisson 2016), the later Platonists will follow Aristotle on that point. Consequently, the polyhedrons corresponding to the elements cannot be taken as boxes with a hollow interior, because in the khôra there is no void, and the gaps between the particles are rapidly filled up. That is why khôra cannot be translated by ‘space’ (Cherniss proposed ‘spatial medium’–see Zeyl 2010). The need to posit its existence arises as a result of a reasoning that unfolds as follows. A body is the image of a Form. Yet since it does not belong to the intelligible, it must necessarily be different from its model. This difference resides in the fact that a body must be present somewhere, whereas the Forms, for their part, are nowhere in our world. All bodies are present in the khôra (52c2–5), which provides them with location. However, the fact of being somewhere entails important consequences. Bodies must be separate from one another, and two bodies cannot occupy the same place. These are necessary conditions for movement, which can be defined as a change of place.5 Hypothesizing the existence of the khôra is the result of a ‘bastard’ reasoning. The epithet ‘bastard’, illegitimate, means that this reasoning has to do neither with intellection, whose objects are the Forms (51e5–6, 52a4) nor with sense perception and opinion, whose objects are the bodies (52a7), even if it is a result of the observation of the sensible. Thus, this experience is akin to a dream (52b3, 7) (Végléris 1982). Sense perception grasps sensible particulars that never stop changing. This incessant change needs something unchanging that does correspond neither to a sensible particular nor to a Form, as in a dream. That said, khôra is not an illusion, but an everlasting genos. This reasoning imposes its conclusion with the same necessity as a mathematical demonstration proves a theorem.

3 Ordering the khôra The ordering of the khôra can be regarded as a likely story (eikôs muthos)6 because there were no witnesses to it.

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d The chaotic khôra Forms, sensible particulars and khôra exist from all eternity, and are not created from nothing. But, in the Timaeus, a distinction must be made between a chaotic state of the khôra preceding the demiurge’s intervention and the present state of affairs. Here is a description, 52d4–53b7: Now as the wet nurse of becoming turns watery and fiery and receives the character of earth and air and as it acquires all the properties that come with these characters, it takes on a variety of visible aspects, but because it is filled with powers that are neither similar nor evenly balanced, insofar as no part of it is in balance. It sways irregularly in every direction as it is shaken by those things, and being set in motion, it in turn shakes them. And as they are moved, they drift continually, some in one direction and others in others, separating from one another. They are winnowed out, as it were, like grain that is sifted by winnowing sieves or other such implements. They are carried off and settle down, the dense and heavy ones in one direction, and the rare and light ones to another place. That is how at that time the four kinds were being shaken by the receiver which was itself agitating like a shaking machine, separating the kinds most unlike each other furthest apart and pushing those most like each other closest together into the same region. This, of course, explains how these different kinds came to occupy different regions of space, even before the universe was set in order and constituted from them at its coming to be. Indeed, it is a fact that before this took place the four kinds all lacked proportion and measure, and at the time the ordering of the universe was undertaken, fire, water, earth and air initially possessed certain traces of what they are now. They were indeed in the condition one would expect thoroughly god-forsaken things to be in. So, finding them in this natural condition, the first thing the god then did was to give them their distinctive shapes, using figures and numbers. Here is a proposition we shall always affirm above all else. The god fashioned the four kinds to be as perfect and excellent as possible when they were not so before.

τὴν δὲ δὴ γενέσεως τιθήνην ὑγραινομένην καὶ πυρουμένην καὶ τὰς γῆς τε καὶ ἀέρος μορφὰς δεχομένην, καὶ ὅσα ἄλλα τούτοις πάθη συνέπεται πάσχουσαν, παντοδαπὴν μὲν ἰδεῖν φαίνεσθαι, διὰ δὲ τὸ μήθ’ ὁμοίων δυνάμεων μήτε ἐμπίμπλασθαι κατ’ οὐδὲν αὐτῆς ἰσορροπεῖν, ἀλλ’ ἀνωμάλως πάντῃ ταλαντουμένην σείεσθαι μὲν ὑπ’ ἐκείνων αὐτήν, κινουμένην δ’ αὖ πάλιν ἐκεῖνα σείειν τὰ δὲ κινούμενα ἄλλα ἄλλοσε ἀεὶ φέρεσθαι διακρινόμενα, ὥσπερ τὰ ὑπὸ τῶν πλοκάνων τε καὶ ὀργάνων τῶν περὶ τὴν τοῦ σίτου κάθαρσιν σειόμενα καὶ ἀνικμώμενα τὰ μὲν πυκνὰ καὶ βαρέα ἄλλῃ, τὰ δὲ μανὰ καὶ κοῦφα εἰς ἑτέραν ἵζει φερόμενα ἕδραν· τότε οὕτω τὰ τέτταρα γένη σειόμενα ὑπὸ τῆς δεξαμενῆς, κινουμένης αὐτῆς οἷον ὀργάνου σεισμὸν παρέχοντος, τὰ μὲν ἀνομοιότατα πλεῖστον αὐτὰ ἀφ’ αὑτῶν ὁρίζειν, τὰ δὲ ὁμοιότατα μάλιστα εἰς ταὐτὸν συνωθεῖν, διὸ δὴ καὶ χώραν ταῦτα ἄλλα ἄλλη ἴσχειν, πρὶν καὶ τὸ πᾶν ἐξ αὐτῶν διακοσμηθὲν γενέσθαι. καὶ τὸ μὲν δὴ πρὸ τούτου πάντα ταῦτ’ εἶχεν ἀλόγως καὶ ἀμέτρως·ὅτε δ’ ἐπεχειρεῖτο κοσμεῖσθαι τὸ πᾶν, πῦρ πρῶτον καὶ ὕδωρ καὶ γῆν καὶ ἀέρα, ἴχνη μὲν ἔχοντα αὑτῶν ἄττα, παντάπασί γε μὴν διακείμενα ὥσπερ εἰκὸς ἔχειν ἅπαν ὅταν ἀπῇ τινος θεός, οὕτω δὴ τότε πεφυκότα ταῦτα πρῶτον διεσχηματίσατο εἴδεσί τε καὶ ἀριθμοῖς. τὸ δὲ ᾗ δυνατὸν ὡς κάλλιστα ἄριστά τε ἐξ οὐχ οὕτως ἐχόντων τὸν θεὸν αὐτὰ συνιστάναι, παρὰ πάντα ἡμῖν ὡς ἀεὶ τοῦτο λεγόμενον ὑπαρχέτω·

How can this difficult passage be interpreted? (Young 1978) 1.

First of all, it should be noted that the Timaeus is a story like Hesiod’s Theogony. And a story is a narrative which has to do with time. That is the problem identified by Aristotle. If the

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world has an origin, because it was made in time, it will have an end.7 This objection is very strong, because it has to do with a general opinion in ancient Greece. How can one escape this conclusion? Our world will not be destroyed, because the demiurge does not will that this should occur (Timaeus 41a–d). The chaotic khôra is, according to the Timaeus, situated in an indefinite duration, as indicated by the adverb ‘before’. The Middle Platonists were consequently led to hypothesize an irrational world soul brought to reason by the intervention of the demiurgic intellect,8 for time implies not only order, before and after, but also measure, which is absent at this stage.9 However, one cannot speak of a time before time. Thus, the narrative process should be dissociated from the metaphysical meaning. The order in the world has a cause, the intellect represented by a demiurge. Still, nobody was there to witness the chaos preceding the demiurge’s intervention, so this description is a mere ‘thought experiment’. The khôra is defined here as the nursemaid of becoming, not merely as the receptable of sensible things, and therefore of the elements out of which sensible things, which are bodies, are made up. It is at the same time that in which bodies are present and that out of which are made. One also notes that there are four elements, the same that play a role in our world.10 Although they are traces, they take on ‘a variety of visible aspects’. What is more, they exhibit the properties that characterize them in the world which we know. That means that the elements have always been in the khôra, albeit as traces. It does not seem, however, that they already have the geometrical configuration they will later exhibit. The fact remains that they are not similar, because they do not feature the same configuration, and as a result they are not in a state of equilibrium. That is why they are subject to a mechanical movement which, although lacking order, unites what is similar and separates it from what is not similar; in fact, the khôra provides a localization for sensible things, as already said, and introduces resistance. All this implies that the khôra is limited, although at this stage we may assume that it is not yet enclosed within a sphere.

Thus, the chaos is already quite rational: there are four elements that are traces of their corresponding forms; it exists before the kosmos; the elements already have a similar configuration and the same property as they have now; and their random movements unite what is similar. On this basis, we may deduce the mode of the demiurge’s intervention negatively. He merely introduces proportion and measure, giving the elements a configuration by means of figures and numbers. In other words, he introduces order into a relative chaos, producing a kosmos, our world being the result. In that context, the question of generation of the kosmos in time loses its importance. Form, khôra and sensible things have always existed, even if the kosmos as order is coextensive with time. As already said, this description is a mere ‘thought-experiment’, in order to illustrate the demiurgic causality.

e The kosmos This chaotic khôra is ordered by the demiurge using mathematics (53c4–e8): First of all, everyone knows, I’m sure, that fire, Πρῶτον μὲν δὴ πῦρ καὶ γῆ καὶ ὕδωρ καὶ ἀὴρ ὅτι earth, water and air are bodies. Now everything σώματά ἐστι, δῆλόν που καὶ παντί· τὸ δὲ τοῦ that has bodily form also has depth. Depth more- σώματος εἶδος πᾶν καὶ βάθος ἔχει. τὸ δὲ βάθος over, is of necessity comprehended within surface, αὖ πᾶσα ἀνάγκη τὴν ἐπίπεδον περιειληφέναι

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Thinking about the unthinkable and any surface bounded by straight lines is composed of triangles. Every triangle, moreover, derives from two triangles, each of which has a right angle and two acute angles. Of the two triangles, one has each of the other two vertices an equal part of a right angle determined by its division by equal sides; while the other has unequal parts of a right angle at its other two vertices, determined by the division of the right angle by unequal sides. This, then, we presume to be the originating principle of fire and the other bodies, as we pursue our likely account in terms of necessity. Principles yet more ultimate than these are known only to the god, and to any man he may hold dear. We should now say which are the most excellent four bodies that come to be. They are quite unlike each other, though some of them are capable of breaking up and turning into others and vice-versa. If our account is on the mark, we shall have the truth about how earth and fire and their proportionate intermediates came to be. For we shall never concede to anyone that there are any visible bodies more excellent than these, each conforming to a single kind. So we must wholeheartedly proceed to fit together the four kinds of bodies of surpassing excellence, and to declare that we have come to grasp their nature well enough.

φύσιν· ἡ δὲ ὀρθὴ τῆς ἐπιπέδου βάσεως ἐκ τριγώνων συνέστηκεν. τὰ δὲ τρίγωνα πάντα ἐκ δυοῖν ἄρχεται τριγώνοιν, μίαν μὲν ὀρθὴν ἔχοντος ἑκατέρου γωνίαν, τὰς δὲ ὀξείας· ὧν τὸ μὲν ἕτερον ἑκατέρωθεν ἔχει μέρος γωνίας ὀρθῆς πλευραῖς ἴσαις διῃρημένης, τὸ δ’ ἕτερον ἀνίσοις ἄνισα μέρη νενεμημένης. ταύτην δὴ πυρὸς ἀρχὴν καὶ τῶν ἄλλων σωμάτων ὑποτιθέμεθα κατὰ τὸν μετ’ ἀνάγκης εἰκότα λόγον πορευόμενοι· τὰς δ’ ἔτι τούτων ἀρχὰς ἄνωθεν θεὸς οἶδεν καὶ ἀνδρῶν ὃς ἂν ἐκείνῳ φίλος ᾖ. δεῖ δὴ λέγειν ποῖα κάλλιστα σώματα γένοιτ’ ἂν τέτταρα, ἀνόμοια μὲν ἑαυτοῖς, δυνατὰ δὲ ἐξ ἀλλήλων αὐτῶν ἄττα διαλυόμενα γίγνεσθαι· τούτου γὰρ τυχόντες ἔχομεν τὴν ἀλήθειαν γενέσεως πέρι γῆς τε καὶ πυρὸς τῶν τε ἀνὰ λόγον ἐν μέσῳ. τόδε γὰρ οὐδενὶ συγχωρησόμεθα, καλλίω τούτων ὁρώμενα σώματα εἶναί που καθ’ ἓν γένος ἕκαστον ὄν. τοῦτ’ οὖν προθυμητέον, τὰ διαφέροντα κάλλει σωμάτων τέτταρα γένη συναρμόσασθαι καὶ φάναι τὴν τούτων ἡμᾶς φύσιν ἱκανῶς εἰληφέναι.

Let us see what information we can derive from this passage. 1.

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The four elements are bodies that should be tangible and visible,11 and that consequently have depth. This is the case for the regular polyhedrons with which they are associated (Harte 2010). Every three-dimensional body is ‘enveloped’ by a two-dimensional, rectilinear surface (τὴν ἐπίπεδον περιειληφέναι φύσιν), the equilateral triangle and the square. The faces of these two plane surfaces themselves derive from triangles, which are in turn limited by straight lines. Only the right-angled triangle need be taken into consideration, or more precisely two types of them: the scalene right-angled triangle, half of an equilateral triangle, and the isosceles right-angled triangle, half of a square. Although, in each case, even if two would have sufficed, six scalene right-angled triangles are used to form the basic equilateral triangle, and four isosceles triangles to form the basic square; one can assume that the point is to preserve an axial symmetry (Brisson 2003). These triangles are mathematical triangles, not physical. They have only two dimensions, and not three as if they were physical ‘tiles’. Aristotle refers to that problem four times in De caelo (III 6, 305a; III 7, 306a; IV 2, 308b–309a and IV 2, 309b). Since these mathematical triangles can cover one another, they are able to constitute squares and equilateral triangles of different sizes. This is what explains the varieties of the four elements (57c–61c). The equilateral triangle serves to form the tetrahedron, the octohedron, and the icosahedron, whereas the square is used to form the cube (54d5–55c6). These geometrical

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figures are linked to physical properties of the four elements (55d–56a): it is interesting to note that the number of angles is taken into consideration, which may be explained by the desire to take into account the penetration rate of each of the elements. However, this incessant change is not totally at random, because the transformation of fire, air and water obeys mathematical rules (56d–57b): 1 fire = 4 ▴ 2 fire = 2 × 4 ▴ = 8 ▴ = 1 air; 1 fire + 2 air = 4 ▴ + 2 × 8 ▴ = 20 ▴ = 1 water 2½ air = 2½ × 8 ▴ = 20 ▴ = 1 water

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Only the faces of the polyhedra are taken into consideration. Hence the following important consequence: only fire, air, and water, which are enveloped by equilateral triangles, can be transformed into one another, earth being excluded from the cycle, since it is enveloped by squares. The basic surfaces, the equilateral triangle and the cube, exhibit several sizes. This can be explained by the fact that the number of right-angled triangles that make them up is greater or lesser. If these right-angled triangles are superposed upon one another the face of the polyhedrons can be of different sizes, which allows the variety of the elements to be accounted for (58c5–61c2).

4 Erratic movements in the khôra f Necessity (anágkê) Even after the intervention of the demiurge, the khôra is subject to incessant change partially resisting order (58a2–c4): We have not explained, however, how it is that the various kinds of bodies have not reached the point of being thoroughly separated from each other kind by kind, so that their transformations into each other and their movement would have come to a halt. So let us return to say this about it: Once the circumference of the universe has comprehended the four kinds, then, because it is round and has a natural tendency to gather in upon itself, it constricts them all and allows no empty space to be left over. This is why fire, more than the other three, has come to infiltrate all of the others, with air in second place, since it is second in degree of subtlety, and so on for the rest. For the bodies that are generated from the largest parts will have the largest gaps left over in their construction, whereas the smallest bodies will have the tiniest. Now this gathering, contracting process squeezes the small parts into the gaps inside the big ones. So now, as the small parts are placed among the large ones and the smaller ones tend to break up the larger ones while the larger tend to cause the smaller to coalesce, they all shift,

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πῶς δέ ποτε οὐ κατὰ γένη διαχωρισθέντα ἕκαστα πέπαυται τῆς δι’ ἀλλήλων κινήσεως καὶ φορᾶς, οὐκ εἴπομεν. ὧδε οὖν πάλιν ἐροῦμεν. ἡ τοῦ παντὸς περίοδος, ἐπειδὴ συμπεριέλαβεν τὰ γένη, κυκλοτερὴς οὖσα καὶ πρὸς αὑτὴν πεφυκυῖα βούλεσθαι συνιέναι, σφίγγει πάντα καὶ κενὴν χώραν οὐδεμίαν ἐᾷ λείπεσθαι. διὸ δὴ πῦρ μὲν εἰς ἅπαντα διελήλυθε μάλιστα, ἀὴρ δὲ δεύτερον, ὡς λεπτότητι δεύτερον ἔφυ, καὶ τἆλλα ταύτῃ τὰ γὰρ ἐκ μεγίστων μερῶν γεγονότα μεγίστην κενότητα ἐν τῇ συστάσει παραλέλοιπεν, τὰ δὲ σμικρότατα ἐλαχίστην. ἡ δὴ τῆς πιλήσεως σύνοδος τὰ σμικρὰ εἰς τὰ τῶν μεγάλων διάκενα συνωθεῖ. σμικρῶν οὖν παρὰ μεγάλα τιθεμένων καὶ τῶν ἐλαττόνων τὰ μείζονα διακρινόντων, τῶν δὲ μειζόνων ἐκεῖνα συγκρινόντων, πάντ’ ἄνω κάτω μεταφέρεται πρὸς τοὺς ἑαυτῶν τόπους μεταβάλλον γὰρ τὸ μέγεθος ἕκαστον καὶ τὴν τόπων μεταβάλλει στάσιν. οὕτω δὴ διὰ ταῦτά τε ἡ τῆς ἀνωμαλότητος διασῳζομένη γένεσις ἀεὶ τὴν

Thinking about the unthinkable up and down, into their own respective regions. For ἀεὶ κίνησιν τούτων as each changes in quantity, it also changes the ἐνδελεχῶς παρέχεται. position of its region. This, then, is how and why the occurrence of non-uniformity is perpetually preserved, and so set theses bodies in perpetual motion, both now and in he future without interruption.

οὖσαν

ἐσομένην

τε

After the demiurge’s intervention, the sphere in which the body of the world consists is moved by the world soul (36e), which is animated by permanent and regular movements, since it contains two circles (36b–d) and obeys a mathematical structure (35b–36b). Nevertheless, this incessant movement becomes more and more irregular as one moves down towards the sensible world. The circular movement of the celestial bodies gives place to the rectilinear movement of bodies on earth.12 1.

2.

This motion affects bodies which, as we have said, occupy one and only one place. Yet this necessary condition does not suffice to explain motion, so that the notions of inequality (ἀνισότης) and absence of uniformity (ἀνωμαλότης) must be mobilized. The four regular polyhedrons are different in form and size, which generates inequality and makes uniformity impossible (57d7–58a2). To explain why the elements never cease moving and transforming into one another, three other conditions are necessary: confinement within a sphere, rotation of this sphere upon itself producing pressure within it, and the absence of void. a. b.

There is no empty space in the sphere of the world: 58a7, 59a1, 79b1, 3, 80c3. The sphere of the world rotates upon itself at tremendous speed, because it has to make a complete revolution in a single day. Aristotle seems to refer to this in De Caelo (II 14, 297b31–298a20). c. The speed of this revolution creates an important pressure (πίλησις) within the sphere, with the following consequence: ‘because it is round and has a natural tendency to gather in upon itself, it constricts (σφίγγει) or presses them all together and allows no empty space to be left over’. We must imagine the world as an immense spherical khôra, configured by four polyhedrons made up of two types of right-angled triangles which cannot constitute a homogeneous whole. Since this sphere is subject to a rotation, pressure is exerted on these polyhedrons, which change their figures, size, and place, decomposing into triangles that are re-composed into other polyhedrons. These changes are instantaneous, so that the interstices between the polyhedrons are constantly filled, and there is no contradiction between the lack of void (κενὴ χώρα οὐδεμία) and interstices (διάκενα). 3.

4.

5.

The bodies that are generated from the largest parts will have the largest gaps left over in their construction, whereas the smallest bodies will have the tiniest. Now this gathering, contracting process squeezes the small parts into the gaps inside the big ones. So now, as the small parts are placed among the large ones and the smaller ones tend to break up the larger ones, while the larger tend to cause the smaller to coalesce, they all shift, up and down, into their own respective regions. Thus, the physics of the Timaeus has nothing to do with atomism, and allows no empty space to be left over. Even Aristotle doesn’t propose this identification, and on the question of weight he considers the Atomists to be more modern than Plato (De Caelo IV 2, 308b30–36). In this sphere which is full, comprehending the totality of the four kinds, and perpetually in 187

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movement, there is a natural tendency for the constricted elements to infiltrate or to squeeze, and finally to gather in upon themselves (Timaeus 58a4–b4). This tendency was already effective before the demiurge introduced order (53a4–8). As each particle changes in quality, it also changes the position of its region. This, then, is how and why the occurrence of non-uniformity is perpetually preserved, and so sets these bodies in perpetual motion both now and in the future without interruption.

However, all these movements are random, and, in Plato’s time, it was not easy, and was even impossible to account for them. As such, they can be seen as a principle of resistance to the ordering process of the intellect, which must persuade anankê. To conclude, the khôra remains at the limit of thinking. But Plato has to hypothesize its existence, even if it is so difficult to talk and think about it, even if there were no witnesses to this ordering, and even if is full of mechanical movements going on at random. It is the only way to explain why sensible particulars, as images, are different from their models, the intelligible forms. The khôra provides a location for all bodies, whose incessant change needs an unchanging medium for their appearance and disappearance.

Notes 1 This interpretation of the Timaeus is thus very different from the two most recent ones that are heavily influenced by Aristotle: Johansen (2004) and Broadie (2012). 2 All translations of the Timaeus are taken from the Zeyl edition (Plato 2000). 3 See Cherniss (1977a), Gulley (1960), Lee (1966, 1967), Cherry (1967), Mills (1968), Zeyl (1975), Alt (1978), and Brisson (2015: chap. 3). 4 See Laws VI 758e3, 760b4. 5 See Parmenides 138d2–3 for one instance. 6 See Brisson (2012) against Burnyeat (2005). 7 According to Aristotle (Nichomachean Ethics VI 4, 1140a10–16) Nature is opposed to art or technique on the following two points: art or technique is not concerned with the end, but seeks to discover the means capable of bringing into being something whose principle is present in the producer. The existence of an object produced by art or technique, and especially the existence of the sensible world, is not necessary but contingent, for it depends on a decision within time. It follows that the world has a temporal origin, and therefore that it can be destroyed, since all that is born must die, a consequence which Aristotle cannot accept. 8 Also, God does not create the soul of the world, since it exists eternally, but he brings it to order, and to this extent he might be said to create it, by awakening and turning towards himself both its intellect and itself, as out of some deep coma or sleep, so that by looking towards the objects of intellection inherent in him it may receive the forms and shapes, through striving to attain to his thoughts (Didaskalikos XIV 169, 35–41). 9 In the Timaeus, time is defined as follows: ‘an eternal image, moving according to number, of eternity remaining in unity’ (37d6–7). In Aristotle, time is defined as ‘the number of motion in accordance with before and after’ (Physics IV, 11, 219b2–3, transl. Dillon). 10 At Timaeus 32b–c, one finds a demonstration of a mathematical type of the necessity that there be only four elements. 11 But they are too small to be touched or seen. 12 For an inventory of movements, see Laws X 893c–899b, and Skemp (1942).

References Algra, K. (1995) Concepts of Space in Greek Thought, Leiden: Brill. Alt, K. (1978) Die Überredung der «Ananke» zur Erklärung der sichtbaren Welt in Platons Timaios, Hermes 106: 426–466.

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Thinking about the unthinkable Botter, B. (2003) Il “ricettacolo” di materia e spazio in Timeo 48e–53b, in C. Natali and S. Maso (eds.), Plato Physicus. Cosmologia e antropologia nel Timeo, Amsterdam: Hakkert, 165–187. Brisson, L. (2001) Comment rendre compte de la participation du sensible à l’intelligible chez Platon?, in J.-F. Pradeau (ed.), Platon. Les formes intelligibles, Paris: PUF, 55–85. Brisson, L. (2003) How and Why do the Building Blocks of the Universe Change Constantly in Plato’s Timaeus (51a–61c)?, in C. Natali and S. Maso (eds.), Plato Physicus. Cosmologia e antropologia nel Timeo, Amsterdam: Hakkert, 189–204. Brisson, L. (2012) Why is the Timaeus Called an eikôs muthos and an eikôs logos?, in C. Collobert, P. Destrée and F. J. Gonzalez (eds.), Plato and Myth. Studies in the Use and Status of Platonic Myths, Leiden: Brill, 369–391. Brisson, L. (2015) Le Même et l’Autre dans la structure ontologique du Timée de Platon [1974], 4th ed., Sankt Augustin: Academia Verlag. Brisson, L. (2016) Aristote, Physique IV 2, 209a3-210a13, Lectures de Platon, 2nd ed., Paris: Vrin, 99–110. Brisson, L. and W. Meyerstein (2014) Inventer l’univers. Le problème de la connaissance et les modèles cosmologiques, 2nd ed., Paris: Les Belles Lettres. Broadie, S. (2012) Nature and Divinity in Plato’s Timaeus, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Burnyeat, M. (2005) Eikos Muthos, Rhizai 2: 143–165. Cherniss, H. (1977a) A Much Misread Passage of the Timaeus (Timaeus 49c7-50c5), in L. Taràn (ed.), Selected Papers, Leiden: Brill, 346–363. Cherniss, H. (1977b) Timaeus 52c2-4, in L. Taràn (ed.), Selected Papers, Leiden: Brill, 364–375. Cherry, R. S. (1967) Timaeus 49c7-50b5, Apeiron 2.1: 1–11. Chesi, G. M. (2016) A Few Notes on toûto and tò toioûton in Plato, Tim. 49 d4–e7, Hyperboreus 22: 127–138. Gulley, N. (1960) The Interpretation of Plato, Timaeus 49d-e, American Journal of Philology 81: 53–64. Harte, V. (2010) The receptacle and the Primary Bodies: Something from Nothing?, in R. Mohr and B. Sattler (eds.), One Book. The Whole Universe, Athens: Parmenides Publishing, 131–140. Johansen, T. K. (2004) Plato’s Natural Philosophy: A Study of the Timaeus-Critias, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lee, E. N. (1966) On the Metaphysics of the Image in Plato’s Timaeus, The Monist 50: 341–368. Lee, E. N. (1967) On Plato’s Timaeus 49d4–e7, American Journal of Philology 88: 1–28. Lee, E. N. (1971) On the “Gold Example” in Plato’s Timaeus (50a5–b5), in J. P. Anton and A. Preus (eds.), Essays in Ancient Greek Philosophy, Albany: SUNY Press, 219–235. Miller, D. R. (2003) The Third Kind in Plato’s Timaeus, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht. Mills, K. W. (1968) Some Aspects of Plato’s Theory of Forms, Timaeus 49c ff., Phronesis 13: 145–170. Mohr, R. D. (1985) The Gold Analogy in Plato’s Timaeus 50a4–b5, Platonic Cosmology, Leiden: Brill, 99–107. Plato (2000) Timaeus, (trans.) D. J. Zeyl, Indianapolis: Hackett. Skemp, J. B. (1942) The Theory of Motion in Plato’s later Dialogues, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Végléris, E. (1982) Platon et le rêve de la nuit, Ktéma 7: 53–65. Young, J. (1978) How Chaotic is Plato’s Chaos?, Prudentia 10: 77–83. Zeyl, D. J. (1975) Plato and Talk of a World in Flux, Timaeus 49a6-50b5, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 79: 125–148. Zeyl, D. J. (2010) Visualing Platonic Space, in R. Mohr and B. Sattler (eds.), One Book. The Whole Universe, Athens: Parmenides Publishing, 117–130.

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14 THOUGHT IN MOTION Lucretius’ materialist practice Thomas Nail

1 Introduction Lucretius was a materialist who understood thinking to be a thoroughly material and performative activity inseparable from nature. Matter, for Lucretius, was neither reductionistic, mechanistic, or vitalist but fundamentally indeterminate, swerving and irreducible to any substance: matter is in constant motion. As such, thinking does not create representations of nature because it is nothing other than nature itself. Thinking and nature, mind and matter, are not ontologically separate kinds of substance for Lucretius. Against the nearly universal interpretation of Lucretius as a reductionist, mechanist and Epicurean rationalist, this chapter argues that Lucretius was perhaps the first process-materialist philosopher and held a profoundly original kinetic theory of knowledge and thinking. This unique perspective on thinking and materialism was directly related to his methodological practice as a philosophical poet. The idea of philosophical poetry is in some sense a challenge to the Greek tradition of philosophy from Thales to Aristotle, including Epicurus.1 With few exceptions, Greek philosophers systematically labelled Homeric poetry as irrational and sensuous mythology in order to contrast this straw man of the oral tradition with their own abstractions and idealisms. This was a founding moment of exclusion that has stayed with the Western tradition up to the present—contributing to a perceived inferiority of oral and indigenous knowledge. It is therefore completely unsurprising that today Lucretius is still almost always invoked as a philosopher completely reducible to the real rational Greek master: Epicurus. The poetic nature of his philosophy is rarely considered, and, because of this, the Western reception of Lucretius has reproduced the same Grecocentric idealist tradition that vilified pre-Greek and Homeric archaic and poetic materialism. Most Western philosophy, even in its most materialist moments, has in one way or another despised matter and valorised thought (Nail 2018a). Lucretius was the first from within this tradition to produce a true and radical materialism based on sensuous thought. However, like Homer, Lucretius also paid the ultimate price for his materialist sins and has now been largely exiled from the discipline of philosophy. By rejecting the divisions between thought, sensation and nature, Lucretius is treated as an ‘unrigorous’ philosopher. Either Lucretius is a skilled poet of the Latin tongue or he is a slavish philosophical imitator of the great master Epicurus. This chapter aims to recover Lucretius as an original philosophical poet in his own right with his own materialist theory of thought. 190

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This chapter provides two concrete examples of Lucretius’ materialist epistemology from his famous poem, De Rerum Natura [The Nature of Things].2 The first is taken from Book I in which Lucretius compares his theory of thought and knowledge to the poetic tradition of oracular truth from the Delphic oracle. The second is taken from Book IV in which he defends the incredible and counterintuitive thesis that ‘all perceptions are true’ and critiques idealist theories of thought.

2 Lucretius at Delphi The first, most sustained definition of ‘thinking’ in De Rerum Natura occurs toward the end of Book I where Lucretius gives a description of where his own thoughts come from that follows closely a description of oracular knowledge at the famous Greek oracle of Delphi. The oracle is inhabited first by the water nymph Telphusa and her guardian dragon Python, who are then displaced by Apollo. After Apollo takes over Delphi, he later ends up sharing it with Dionysus. Dionysian cults eventually took up residence during the winter months at Delphi, while Apollo was away. Dionysus, as the bull god at Delphi, thus becomes connected to the goddess Pasiphae, the bull goddess, and to oracular truth revealed in the sacrifice of the bull during the rising of the star Sirius and the New Year. After the Dionysian sacrifice of the bull, its head is filled with bees which swarm from its skull like the living souls of the dead, producing life from death. The humming of the bees is heard as the ‘voice’ of the goddess, and the ‘sound’ of creation. Virgil describes the sound as ‘the cymbals of the Great-Mother’. Hence the other description of the Pythian maidens as ‘Delphic bees’. In Book I, Lucretius imagines himself, as a philosophical poet, participating directly in this tradition of materialist epistemology and the emancipation of the sensuous in the name of truth (1.921–26): nec me animi fallit quam sint obscura; sed acri percussit thyrso laudis spes magna meum cor et simul incussit suavem mi in pectus amorem Musarum, quo nunc instinctus mente vigenti avia Pieridum peragro loca nullius ante trita solo. I am very aware how obscure these things are. But great hope for praise strikes my heart with a sharp thyrsus and at the same time strikes into my breast sweet love for the Muses. Now roused by this in my lively mind I am traversing the remote places of the Pierides, untrodden by the sole of anyone before. The corpora, like the hidden material flows of vapours and water that move under the earth at Delphi, are obscure [obscura] (1.921) and invisible, but they are no less corporeal and material truths that can be attained through sensation. The great laudable discovery of the flows of matter penetrates [acri] Lucretius’ heart [cor] and strikes [percussit] him like a sharp thyrsus [thyrso] that brings a love [amorem] for the Muses that will give him the power to discover these hidden matters (1.921–23). The thyrso is the wand of Dionysus, a symbol of fertility, pleasure and sensation. The wand was made of fennel, shaped like the shaft of the penis, and had a pinecone full of seeds on the end of it. As Euripides writes, ‘Make the violent fennel-wands holy all round! Immediately the whole land will dance …’ The thyrso was then dipped in honey, connecting it both to the tradition of the oracular bees of Dionysus and to the alcoholic mead made from honey, and to 191

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the tradition of truth-telling through intoxication and thus to Delphi, where the Bacchic revels were held and connected to oracular revelation. Lucretius’ philosophical poem and materialism fit perfectly into this combination of truth through sensation and contrasts with the mental divination of the lesser philosophers. Lucretius allows his body to be penetrated by the thyrso and impregnated by its seeds. Through the introduction of matter into the body in the form of intoxicating or altering substances, mead, herbs, fumes, and so on, Lucretius’ mind blooms [mente vigenti] (1.925) and comes to life. The mind is no longer its own little divine inner temple from which all things come forth, but itself becomes invaginated, unfolded to the exterior of the material world, through the sensation of the flows of Dionysus’ seed laden honey-wine. The seeds are planted in Lucretius and they begin to grow, blossom and flourish like plants in his love-intoxicated mind. With his living, blooming mind, Lucretius begins to wander [peragro] (1.926), just as Epicurus did through the universe, through the remote, obscure, wild, mountainous regions of the Muses, where no one has gone before: Pieridum (1.926). Sensuous love for the Muses, through Dionysus, is going to transport him to regions of nature yet untravelled. The Muses, the goddesses of song, dance, poetry and drama, live in the Pierides, but Lucretius is going to wander in the most wild and obscure parts of these mountains to bring back something new. This kind of invocation is in direct contrast to the Platonic idea that philosophy should only make use of the Muses through the intellect and not through non-rational pleasure. As Plato writes in the Timaeus: And attunement, which has coursings akin to the circuits in our soul, has been given by the Muses to him who makes use of the Muses with his intellect, not for the purpose of irrational pleasure (which is what it’s now thought to be useful for), but as an ally to the circuit of the soul within us once it’s become untuned, for the purpose of bringing the soul into arrangement and concord with herself. Plato rejects the use of the Muses for non-intellectual pleasure, as they are most often invoked. Instead, Plato believes that what is true about the arts is not their pleasure, but the pure ideal forms that they express. Lucretius thus differs starkly both from Plato and from the typical use of the Muses. On the one hand, he does not subject the Muses and arts to a purely formal intellection from his own mind; on the other, he does not simply remain at the level of socalled irrational pleasure either. Instead, Lucretius wants to get at the material conditions by which sensation is itself produced. Even though the most obscure regions of the Pierides are invisible, this does not mean they are immaterial. Lucretius thus discovers the material conditions of sensibility itself through sensation and not as a rejection of it or a naive acceptance of it. In other words, he puts forward neither an anthropic constructivism nor a metaphysics, but a transcendental materialism: the minimal conditions that nature must at least resemble for our sensations to be possible.

3 The Muses In the Pierides, Lucretius drinks from the obscure flowing source of all things [fontes] and, by revealing the material conditions of things, it/he also reveals the possibility of the emancipation of the senses from the moeneric knots of religio (1.927–34). iuvat integros accedere fontis atque haurire iuvatque novos decerpere flores 192

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insignemque meo capiti petere inde coronam, unde prius nulli velarint tempora Musae; primum quod magnis doceo de rebus et artis religionum animum nodis exsolvere pergo, deinde quod obscura de re tam lucida pango carmina musaeo contingens cuncta lepore. It is a joy to approach pure springs and to drink from them, and it is a joy to pick new flowers and to seek a pre-eminent crown for my head from that place whence the Muses had wreathed the temples of no one before; first because I am teaching about great things and proceeding to free the mind from the narrow bonds of religion, next because I am writing so clear a poem about so obscure a subject, touching everything with the charm of the Muses. Lucretius receives pleasure [iuvat] from the undivided [integros] flows of mountain water sources [fontes] in the Pierides (1.927). Their dark, forested, mountain regions are nourishing and unbroken by social or political divisions or borders; they remain wild and undivided. Lucretius drinks or draws up [haurire] (1.928) the hidden waters from the pure [integros] (1.927) mountain springs, like those who drank from Telphusa’s oracular Delphi in its hidden forest, just as others now drink from those same hidden waters inside the craggy Apollonian Delphi. Materialist knowledge has its kinetic source in the babbling and speaking of matter, which is internalized through the body. Lucretius then receives pleasure by picking the young mountain flowers [iuvatque novos decerpere flores] (1.928) and forming them into a laurel wreath around his head, just as the Dionysians and Apollonians do at Delphi. But the laurels at Delphi are also oracular hallucinogens which make the mind come alive like a plant. The mind is freed not through the destruction of an external obstacle, but through the transformation of its inner material conditions: the body itself. The knots [nodos] (1.950) of religio are loosened or untied [exsolvere] (1.932). Religio is not something separate from nature, but rather a knot in nature itself. Topologically, a knot occurs when two or more corporeal flows have become stuck and are bound together in a seemingly fixed pattern. Unknotting does not mean the destruction of the flows, but rather their redistribution and open circulation into other formations. Again, the conditions of transformation are not ideological, but material. ‘Changing’ one’s mind is literal and material for Lucretius. Since one’s mind is part of the world, changing one’s mind is also changing part of the world. Or, as Marx writes, ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it’. Marx was thinking of political revolution, but his statement is also true more generally of the material nature of thought. The emancipation of the senses quite literally means moving differently [religionum animum nodis exsolvere pergo] (1.932); to stop moving in the same knotted pattern and loosen up the bonds so that one can wander and move more freely [pergo]. The emancipation of the senses is thus a kinetic and material process.

4 The honeyed cup Lucretius concludes this section on his poetic method with his famous description of his poetry as a cup of bitter medicine with honey around the lip. This description operates on several different levels at once (1.936–39).

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sed vel uti pueris absinthia taetra medentes cum dare conantur, prius oras pocula circum contingunt mellis dulci flavoque liquore just as when physicians try to give loathsome wormwood to children, they first touch the rim of the cup all around with the sweet, golden liquid of honey Metaphorical. On the first most straightforward and uninteresting level, Lucretius is giving his Roman audience a revolutionary critique of all previously existing philosophy, which they do not want to hear, but he is giving it to them in ‘sweet Pierian song’, or poetic hexameter (1.947). Methodological. On another level, however, this implies a certain philosophical methodology. It implies a rejection of at least three kinds of philosophical method. First, it is opposed to a purely idealist method of simply consulting one’s ‘inner temple of the mind’, and deriving first principles exclusively from the mind itself or its supposed logical connection (analogical or otherwise) to being qua being. If this were the case, no liquid or medicine of any kind would be needed, since the problem of knowledge is not related to the body at all. It would not be a question of medicine but of pure thought. Second, it is opposed to an abstract philosophical materialism, which, despite its claim to materialism, proceeds entirely without reference to any sensuous existence, history, or actual matter. Abstract materialism proceeds through the bitter juice of logic and reason. Lucretius’ method differs from this one in that his practice of thinking of nature is done sensuously through a body, in a place, and in history. Lucretius does not hold a theory of matter in itself, or independently of the poetic method for thinking it. Third, it is opposed to a naive empiricist account where all of nature is reduced to our sensuous experience of it. If nature is merely the sum total of our experiences of it, we have failed to explain the nature of things. The conditions by which things themselves appear are themselves not things; they are processes. Things are metastable processes like eddies or whirlpools in the flows of matter. In other words, it is not enough to drink a cup of honey and simply indulge the senses. One needs the hidden bitter herbs as well that circulate through the body and alter its metastable being. The philosophical method implied by the honeyed cup of bitter herbs is distinct from all three methods above. For Lucretius, the knowledge of nature originates not in the mind, but in the nature of nature itself, of which our bodies and minds are folds. Thought is a product of this more primary ontogenetic process. Nature is the material condition under which thought occurs as such. Therefore, knowledge is material and kinetic and emerges first and foremost from the earth in fresh liquid flows, which the body draws up and invaginates into itself like a thyrsus penetrating one’s heart. It emerges in places like the oracular freshwater spring of Telphusa and the volcanic gases at Delphi, anywhere where nature enters into the body and transforms it, giving it speech and thought—knowledge is not merely an interpretation of nature. Thus, for Lucretius, knowledge of nature comes not through contemplation or interpretation but through material transformation. The honeyed cup of bitter herbs is not just a metaphor. The knowledge of nature comes through our enfolding of nature into our own body in different and transformative ways; in other words, through medicinal [medentes] (1.936) matter that makes us stronger and transforms our ways of thinking and being. Philosophical knowledge comes through the pleasure of the senses in the honey, but in combination with the transformative herbs the conditions of sensation themselves are altered, allowing us see that the senses themselves function only on the material condition of the body and the body only on the condition of nature itself, 194

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which must have a specific kind of structure to make this possible. From the difference introduced by this material transformation of medicine we are able to see that nature must be at least structured in certain ways to make such a change in sensation itself possible. Nature is pleasurable to our senses in the honey, but also corporeally transformative in the bitter herbs. By ingesting the pharmakon of herbs, the body and mind are exposed and vulnerable to the externality of nature, which through nourishment and digestion becomes the enfolded and internal conditions of corporeal sensation itself. Through the vulnerability of the wound or orifice [vulnere] (1.34) of the body, the inside is exposed to the outside and revealed as nature folded, complicated in the body and explicated by the mind. Philosophy, for Lucretius, is not reflection, contemplation, or communication, but material transformation. Knowledge never comes from the rotting moenera of a mind closed off from the world, but from the earth whose flows we are folds in, from whose pure externality our internality is produced. Material knowledge comes from our vulnerability to the flows of nature and capacity to affect and be affected by them. The honeyed cup of herbs is a corporeal flow that springs up from the earth and offers us the two basic conditions of philosophical thought: the pleasure of the senses in the honey and the transformative possibility of the herbs which expose to us the material conditions of sensation itself in nature. Mythological. A third level of meaning in these lines is mythological. It is not a coincidence that the honeyed cup example comes directly after the valorisation of oracular truth and the inspiration of the Muses. The honeyed cup integrates three major material aspects of oracular or kinetic knowledge: (1) the honey made in the Dionysian bull’s skull by the Delphic bees, whose humming is the oracular speech of life itself coming from dead matter; (2) the bitter herbs or laurels ingested by the Pythian priestess at Delphi to produce oracular speech by psychophysical transformation; and (3) the fresh spring water of the Telphusan, Delphic, and wild mountain Pierian springs of the Muses that makes oracular and poetic speech possible. The honeyed cup is therefore a poetic synthesis of all the oracular materials directly referenced in the previous lines of the poem. In addition, it is also a reference to the drinking cup of Dionysus. The thyrsus wand and the honeyed cup are core materials at Dionysian festivals, related both to fertility, pleasure, and oracular speech. The fennel wand is the shaft of the penis, the pinecone at the end contains the seeds dipped in the sweet honey of desire. The wand is then dipped into the cup or vulva filled with bitter-sweet honey wine. The process brings pleasure, fertility, intoxication, and oracular speech. The honeyed cup image operates at all three of these levels at once. The general implication that all three share is that knowledge of nature comes not through contemplation, reflection, or communication, but through the emancipation of the senses by the material transformation of nature.

5 All perceptions are true One of the most significant barriers to thinking, according to Lucretius, is what he calls ‘twisted reasoning’ [perversa … ratione] (4.833), which acts as if the mind is something above and beyond nature and sensation. Thinking, like movement, does not originate in the mind but in nature and in the body. Nature, body and mind, as we have seen, are completely continuous with one another—without any ontological division in the movement of matter. The mind and body are metastable formations in the flows of matter. Twisted reasoning posits a dualistic division between mind and the rest of nature, including the body—as if the mind were something that came from but ultimately broke with nature. By using this twisted reasoning, according to Lucretius, the mind is prone to a number of errors of 195

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‘self-deception’ (4.817) that entangle us in all kinds of mental delusions. The real ground of thinking lies in sensuous perception. This is what Lucretius shows us in lines 4.216–822. In these lines, Lucretius proposes one of the most radical and heretical arguments in the history of Western philosophy against all forms of idealism. Lucretius argues that all perceptions are true. This thesis seems counterintuitive at first because the ontological division between nature, body, and mind is so ingrained in Western thought. However, if we do not accept a division between epistemology and ontology, then Lucretius’ thesis follows directly: if the mind is something natural, then nature is something minded. If perception is something nature does to itself, then it cannot be false. The mind is a perceptual organ whose actions of thought (as nature) are onto-epistemologically true as well. The error of self-delusion occurs, however, when we act as if nature, body or mind are false. This, for Lucretius, is a direct contradiction and impossibility. The idea that there could be ‘false being’ is possible only if one accepts an ontological dualism between God and nature, or mind and body. If nature is a multiplicity of flows or processes, there is no one absolute truth nor are there many false positions. The whole distinction between true and false is uprooted at its dualistic core. Humans do not ‘construct ideas about nature’ with their minds or cultures and thus remain cut off from the nature of things—nature really constructs itself through human actions. Thus, ethics is not just something humans do to one another or to nature but something nature does to itself.

6 The flow of things Things flow without cease. This is an absolutely essential starting point to overcoming the division between mind and nature and the twisted idealism of ethical theory. ‘Matter’ [corpora] (4.217) ‘flows continuously’ [perpetuoque fluunt] (4.218) ‘without any delay, division, or discrete break in the flow’ [nec mora nec requies interdatur ulla fluendi] (4.227). Since there is no division in the continuous flux of matter, the division between mind and nature is ontologically impossible. All things are in flux, radiating simulacra in all directions and diffracting with one another. The threads of matter [primordia] weave together the flow of simulacral bodies. These material flows weave patterns that can be touched, seen, tasted, smelled, felt, and thought together as different ‘co-moving’ [commovet] simulacral dimensions (4.235). There is no action at a distance in sensation. All sensation is true precisely because there is no distance, ‘delay, division, or discrete break in the flow’ of matter. Distance and division are the precondition for the division between true and false. Performatively speaking, however, no performance can be false in what it does if it is a kinetically continuous region of nature. For example, it seems obvious to say that the movement of a river is not true or false. If we direct it one way to irrigate crops, this is not true or false; the redirecting simply has a range of ecological and agricultural effects that we can describe and prefer or not prefer. The human utterance, ‘This is not a river’, is a true performative speech-act. However, when one says, ‘this is not a river’, and points to a river, this becomes a ‘false’ statement. But if such speech habits and kinetic coordinations of sound and action are not universal but historical patterns of action, then they cannot be absolutely true or false either. Performative speech acts then reveal themselves as continuous with nature as real patterns and habits and thus as part of a fundamentally ethical practice to prefer some sounds (‘This is a river’) to others (‘This is not a river’). What we call a true statement is just a coordinated habit. When the habit of sound and action is broken we call this ‘false’. Poetry, then, is the act of making new sounds/action patterns. Ethics is the collective practice of following some patterns and not others. In this sense, Lucretius does not and cannot accept the historical divisions between ethics, politics, aesthetics, epistemology, and ontology. Each is only a dimension or region of a single continuously moving reality. We can focus on 196

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what it means to move well together just like one can take a walk down one trail or another of the same forest.

7 Interweaving sensation Sensation, for Lucretius, is a mutual and reciprocal process. This point follows from the continuous fluctuating of things in which there is no delay or discrete division in nature. There is no action at a distance because nature is not made of discrete particles or atoms. Lucretius is quite clear about this when he writes that ‘wherever we turn our sight, all things there strike it directly with their shape and colour’ [propterea fit uti, speciem quo vertimus, omnes res ibi eam contra feriant forma atque colore] (4.242–43). Vision is thus not a merely passive or neutral reception of sense data. This is not only because all of nature flows and releases simulacra, but also because vision is something actively directed or turned [vertimus] in the world. Vision is something that is actively performed and even something that actively transforms what it sees insofar as it is in a position which reflects and emits light. What we see is not there passively but is an actively diffracted simulacral image of the meeting between the movement of the body, head, eye and other aspects of nature. The where of moving bodies is something we actively do and thus part of what is seen. Maurice Merleau-Ponty expresses this Lucretian insight quite well when he says, We see only what we look at. What would vision be without eye movement? And how could the movement of the eyes bring things together if the movement were blind? If it were only a reflex? If it did not have its antennae, its clairvoyance? If vision were not prefigured in it? (1964: 162). ‘Vision’, Merleau-Ponty says, ‘is a palpation with the look, it must also be inscribed in the order of being that it discloses to us; he who looks must not himself be foreign to the world that he looks at’ (Merleau-Ponty 1992: 134). This is a crucial insight already developed more radically by Lucretius: if nature is not ontologically divided from itself, then vision is already nature responding to itself in the active movement of the searching eye and moving body that responds pre-subjectively and affectively to the world. Vision, as Merleau-Ponty says, ‘is not a decision made by the mind, an absolute doing which would decree, from the depths of a subjective retreat’ (1964: 162). For Lucretius, vision is already nature responding to itself. Vision is not two separate parts interacting but is one continuous flux of transformation. Merleau-Ponty focuses on human vision, but the same is true of nature’s own vision of us. Nature palpates us with its own look. Merleau-Ponty was close but still got things ‘twisted’: nature is not ‘flesh’ (which is still too closely modelled on the anthropocentric and biocentric idea of ‘living flesh’), but everything is a material and simulacral fabric. This is an absolutely radical claim. If there is no action at a distance, then vision does not merely tell us something about the object being perceived, it expresses a transformation of the whole situation. Our eyes are just one region of this transformation responding to a mutual palpation of eye and nature. Lucretius thus says that ‘the image produces vision and supports an inter-knowledge’ [internoscere] (4.245) of the between, or becoming, of the situation. Light physically touches and palpates our eyes, and our eyes physically move and palpate the light back. Vision and knowledge are thus not universal but situated and positional. Depending on how or in what manner [quam] a quantity [quanto] of air is agitated [aëris ante agitatur] and for what duration [perterget longior] from our body determines how far away things will look (4.250–54). The object, the air, and the eye thus play simultaneously active roles in 197

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the creation of vision. Instead of an action at a distance, there is a continuous transformation of the whole. Different lengths of air vibrate [perterget longior; aëris ante agitatur] at different frequencies depending on colour, shape, and distance from our moving head. This is how the perception of distance works in a world without any ontological division: different degrees and frequencies of flux. For Lucretius, there are no static essences, objects or immortal eidos (Serres, 2000: 105).3 There are only flows of phantasmal, decaying processes whose metastable and intertwined patterns are the real world without essence. In Lucretius I, I used the phrase ‘we know now’, in a strictly and positional historical sense (Nail 2018b). Given where, when and how we are, this is the real performative structure of knowledge we have regarding quantum theory. Here, then, we can see explicitly that the use of scientific knowledge, including my own in Lucretius I, is fundamentally situated and historical—not absolute. We always return to Lucretius from where we are: the present. But this does not make his resonance with contemporary physics any less real. There is a real diffraction of contemporary quantum physics with Lucretius’ texts. Any theory of observation that does not take quantum/simulacral entanglement into account is not consistent with the ethico-aesthetics developed by Lucretius in Books III and IV. Some of the most important methodological insights of twentieth-century physics have still not been taken seriously by most twenty-first-century physicists. Werner Heisenberg’s ‘complementarity’, Neils Bohr’s ‘indeterminacy’, and John Bell’s ‘inequality and entanglement’ are experimental and contemporary ideas consistent with Lucretius’ theory of simulacral diffraction (Barad 2007; Nail forthcoming: chap. 16). If Heisenberg, Bohr and Bell were right that there is no ontological division between observer and observed, then Lucretius’ thesis that ‘all perceptions are true’ also follows directly. Science is nature observing itself (Nail forthcoming). We do not see things bit by bit, Lucretius says, ‘but rather the whole all at once’ (4.262). However, the whole is not the interaction of all its discrete parts. Simulacra are not discrete. Rather, we sense the whole diffractive pattern at once. Henri Bergson draws similarly on Lucretius’ theory of images in Matter and Memory when he writes that ‘we grasp, in perception, at one and the same time, a state of our consciousness and a reality independent of ourselves’, and not ‘atoms or whatnot—which interpose their solidity between the movement itself’ (Bergson 2005: 203).

8 The fault of the mind All our perceptions are true, and all error is the fault of the mind, which tries to deduce universal attributes from the singularities of sensation. ‘Nor yet do we admit that the eyes are at all deceived in this … Thus do not falsely attribute this fault [adfingere] of the mind to the eyes’ (4.379–85). The Latin word fingere means to ‘form, fashion, devise, make or add on to’. For Lucretius, the movements of the mind do not re-present reality but rather are added onto other perceptions. The mind, like the other senses, cannot doubt another sense but is merely added to the others. Together, the senses produce a heterogenous composite of sensation. Error arises when the creative movements of the mind are privileged or used to judge the other senses and attribute universal unities, fixities and identities to the processes and movements of nature beyond what is actually sensed. However, the eyes alone are not ‘able to know the nature of things’ because the nature of things are not reducibly visual, nor oral, nor audible nor mental. The senses do not know anything about the nature of things because they are the nature of things. The nature of things, as discussed in Books I and II are the immanent material conditions of things. The nature of things [natura rerum] is not reducible to sensuous rerum in the same way that the flow of a river eddy is not reducible to the eddy itself, which is continually replenished. The senses are always true because they always perform the nature of things without representing them. The nature of 198

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things is not something Lucretius knows about with his mind alone. That is Epicurean rationalism. The nature of things is something Lucretius immanently performs in the poetic act itself. Again, if there is no delay or discreteness between simulacra or humans and nature, there is no such thing as representation. The nature of things is continuous with the performative textum of the poem itself as it is sung or read. This is why weaving is the central poetic image of De Rerum Natura. Nature and poetry are both weaving performances (textum/nexus/plexus/flexus). Poetry is not like the weaving of nature; it is nature weaving itself in song. Nature is poetic. How can one know the kinetic process which one enacts in the very performance of the act or practice of knowing? This is why epistemology is always ethical. It is practice; something done. However, if knowledge is something done, then by definition its sensuous act cannot be universal—since an act is always singular, positional, and sensuous. This is precisely the danger of reading Lucretius as an Epicurean rationalist/fundamentalist putting forward philosophical propositions in accordance with the master. This kind of reading misses the central paradox of kinetic materialism: knowing the moving nature that one is. Lucretius thus performs avant la lettre a Kantian immanent critique but of the material conditions of nature not the ideal conditions of the mind. The nature of things is knowing only through the fully sensuous performance of all the senses together as nature’s own performance of itself through the poetic act (4.380–83). nam quo cumque loco sit lux atque umbra tueri illorum est; eadem vero sint lumina necne, umbraque quae fuit hic eadem nunc transeat illuc, an potius fiat paulo quod diximus ante, For it belongs to them (the eyes) to see at whatever point there is light and shadow. But whether the lights are the same or not, or whether it is the same shadow which was here and now moves over there. or whether it rather happens as we said a little before, The eyes see and immanently perform light and shadow in their palpating dilation and movement, but the mind adds something unseen: spatiotemporal unity and difference. The mental actions of unity and difference are sensuous things added to our perception of things. The performative act of adding ideas to things is true as a performative act of nature sensing itself but false as an attribute of substance. Nature is not a substance but the process itself of sensuous addition, which the mind also performs. Perceptual ‘illusions’ such as bent sticks in water, the feeling of stability on a moving boat, the meeting of parallel columns at a distance, the sun touching the mountains, and so on, are not false but rather expressions of real kinetic process of the body with and as nature. Nature tells us something about our own body and its movements and position through simulacra. The senses in turn tell us something about the natural world of which they are continuous. The lessons of the senses tell us about the intertwining of nature with itself, but the mind acts as if the continuous transformation of the sensuous whole is an ‘illusion’ (4.462–68) Cetera de genere hoc mirande multa videmus, quae violare fidem quasi sensibus omnia quaerunt, ne quiquam, quoniam pars horum maxima fallit propter opinatus animi, quos addimus ipsi, pro visis ut sint quae non sunt sensibus visa; 199

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nam nihil aegrius est quam res secernere apertas ab dubiis, animus quas ab se protinus addit. We see an amazing number of other things of this type, all of which seek to shatter one’s trust, so to speak, in the senses but in vain, since by far the largest part of these deceive because of the inferences of the mind, which we ourselves contribute so that things not seen by the senses are taken as things seen. For nothing is more difficult than to distinguish clear things from doubtful ones which the mind adds immediately on its own. For Lucretius, the mind does not represent or judge [opinatus] sensation or nature but rather ‘adds’ [addimus/addit] mental sensations or ideas of its own to the whole sensuous assemblage. Stasis, for example, is not something our senses ever do because they are always actively responding to their milieu. The idea of stasis is a cognitive activity added to things by our minds. But the addition itself is a kinetic act. Ideas are something we do, not something we have. Simulacra do not represent one another. They are not models of originals. They are the kinetic performance of nature itself more primary and immanent than any division between true and false, model and copy, nature and human, and so on. The mind, as Lucretius says in Book III, is an organ like our others and interwoven with the whole body. This is the basis for Lucretius’ complete rejection of scepticism.

9 Against scepticism: against idealism The most extreme idealist and unethical position is that of scepticism. Not only does scepticism assume that the mind is radically different than nature and the body such that it can doubt them, but it then assumes an absolute form of ideal mental knowledge in the form of the certainty of its own doubt. This was Descartes’ logic. Lucretius, however, sings this critique in two beautiful lines of hexameter (4.469–70): Denique nil sciri siquis putat, id quoque nescit an sciri possit, quoniam nil scire fatetur. Next, if anyone thinks that nothing is known, he also doesn’t know whether this can be known, since he admits he knows nothing. Scepticism is a ‘twisted reasoning’ because it doubts or treats as false its own immanent performativity. It acts as if it has not acted. It thinks as if it is not thinking and knows as if it knows nothing. The sceptic, Lucretius says, has ‘stuck his head under his feet’, as if thought comes first and supports the senses and all of nature. Marx, following Lucretius, makes a very similar statement about Hegel in the postface to the second edition of Capital. The mystification which the dialectic suffers in Hegel’s hands by no means prevents him from being the first to present its general forms of motion in a comprehensive and conscious manner. With him it is standing on its head. It must be inverted, in order to discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell. (Marx 1976: 103) The twisted reasoning of all idealism is to move, act and know while denying its very own act of knowing as a material practice or performance continuous with sensuous nature itself. 200

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Lucretius was one of the first in the Western tradition to fully invert this twisted reasoning and place nature and sensation at the foundations of philosophy (4.474–77). quaeram, cum in rebus veri nil viderit ante, unde sciat quid sit scire et nescire vicissim, notitiam veri quae res falsique crearit et dubium certo quae res differre probarit. I will ask: Since he has never found any truth in things before, from where does he know what it is to know and not know in turn, what thing created the concept of true and false, and what thing has demonstrated that the doubtful differs from the sure. Knowledge, for Lucretius, comes from somewhere [unde] (4.475). It is geographically, materially and historically situated. We can now see in these lines that, for Lucretius, the thesis that ‘all perceptions are true’ means something more radical that we first thought. All perceptions are true not in the sense in which they are the opposite of what is false, but rather true in the most profound sense of the term: that they are the real, immanent, material conditions that produce the division between true and false in the first place. The radical nature of this point cannot be understated. The distinction between true and false is an emergent property of nature itself. In other words, humans are not the origin of the division between true and false, but the apparent division is already something produced by a more radical material movement of nature. Nature, therefore, cannot be said to lack knowledge of the true but is actually the true producer of the knowledge—that is, of truth and falsity itself (4.478–79). invenies primis ab sensibus esse creatam notitiem veri neque sensus posse refelli. You will find that the concept of truth is created first of all from the senses and that the senses cannot be refuted. Humans are not freaks of nature (Fromm 1968: 61). We cannot ‘explain human existence in terms of an immaculate conception, where human species being is exceptional because it breaks with all precedent’ (Kirby 2018: 52). The concepts of true and false are born from the senses; thus, the senses themselves cannot be reduced to true and false. Ethical and moral theories of goodness/ truth and evil/falsity are predicated on the immaculate conception of humans cut off from nature. A radical and materialist naturalism must therefore reject the division and thus the traditional categories of ethical thought. The senses are radically and performatively true. Since nature is not a substance but a process, it has no static or fixed state that can be called true or false. A discrete and binary division cannot be applied to that which is neither true nor false, but which is the condition of knowledge itself. Sensation does not abide the law of noncontradiction (Nail forthcoming: chap. 17). ‘Unless they [the senses] are true, reason too becomes completely false’ (4.485). Nature and sensation are the material conditions of contradiction and division as such. Without the senses, reason and the mind become completely empty and meaningless. How can reason possibly come from nature and yet be radically different than nature? No sense can refute another because each is true in a qualitatively unique way, according to Lucretius. This includes thought. Thought cannot refute or represent the senses just as the senses cannot refute one another. Also, ‘They [the senses] cannot refute themselves, since equal 201

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trust must always be granted them’ (4.497–98). ‘Accordingly, that which has appeared to the senses on each occasion is true’ (4.499–500). In fact, Lucretius says, it would be better to give purely sensuous descriptions of events as processes, even if their cause was not known, because at least then we would not err by doubting the senses. All reasoning that begins with the division between true and false, between nature and culture, and mind and nature, for Lucretius is fundamentally ‘warped’ from the beginning. Once a dualism is posited, we never get the two back together again. ‘Truth’ then should be understood as what nature does and ‘false’ as that which performatively doubts the continuous flow of nature and simulacra that it is.

10 The diffractive harmony of the senses The senses do not represent one another, nor do they have any ability to refute one another (4.522–4.3). Nunc alii sensus quo pacto quisque suam rem sentiat, haud quaquam ratio scruposa relicta est. Now understanding how the other senses sew together their own things requires no rocky road of reasoning. This is an absolutely radical rejection of representation in all its forms. The Latin is tricky to translate concisely, though. The senses (other than thought) form a kind of ‘performative agreement’ [pacto] (4.522) among themselves about how things [rem] (4.522) are ‘sewn’ up [suam] (4.523). One reads suam at first as coming from the possessive pronoun suus (‘its own’), but the root su- in Latin suggests also ‘to sew’. In other words, what things are is precisely the processes that iterate, sew and stabilize them as such. The implication here is that the senses do not merely represent things but rather form a kind of diffractive relationship with them that transforms them—just as two pieces of cloth are sewn together. The relationship is transformative. The senses sense their object but in sensing their object are also sensing themselves through the object. Even more importantly, however, the senses and object are collectively transformed in the same act of weaving and entanglement. Representation is therefore out of the question. There is only transformation. The five senses, if it makes sense to limit sensation to five, do not represent one another or even fit together like pieces of a puzzle but diffract with one another and their objects of sensation. The result is a continuously transforming knotwork of woven and unwoven fabrics, not a representational hierarchy. Flows of sound (sound waves), for example, are material and can physically scratch the throat (4.525–32) and are shaped by the tongue as they flow out of the body (550–55). Loud sounds can damage our ears, bright lights can damage our eyes and so on because sensation is affective. We only tend to think about this mutual affectation when it hurts us, but such transformations are always occurring. The senses do not merely receive but participate in the world because they are the world as well. Our sense organs dilate and palpate in a diffractive harmony with the world.

11 The ecokinetic imagination The mind, for Lucretius, is a sense organ like any other. It does not represent nature but is a relay that is affected by the flows of simulacra and affects them in turn. Matter from the world flows and diffracts in every direction. Some of these flows (light, sound, temperature, and so on) affect the body, of which the mind is an immanent part. Simulacra thus directly affect the mind 202

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because the mind is not separate from the body. The mind, for Lucretius, is bodily. Therefore ‘things move the mind’ [moveant animum res accipe] (4.722). The flows, however, that affect the mind are so fine that we do not have any direct sensation of them (4.728–31). quippe etenim multo magis haec sunt tenvia textu quam quae percipiunt oculos visumque lacessunt, corporis haec quoniam penetrant per rara cientque tenvem animi naturam intus sensumque lacessunt. For indeed these images are much more fine in texture than those which take hold of the eyes and strike the faculty of sight, since these pass through the pores of the body and stir the fine nature of the mind within and provoke sensation. Matter from the environment affects our mind. However, affect (in contrast to empirical sensuous emotion) is not something that can be directly sensed. For example, small changes in temperature, slow or subtle shifts in lighting, the shape and size of a room and ambient smells all affect our thinking and feeling even if, and perhaps because, we do not directly sense or realize they are affecting our bodies in these ways (Lobel 2016; Massumi 2002). Simulacra of all kinds weave together effects that move our bodies and minds in extremely subtle ways that contemporary neuroscience, physiology and ecopsychology are only just beginning to study. Lucretius was well aware of these subtly woven [textu] (4.728) patterns of affect that occur below the level of conscious sensation and feeling. For example, when our minds are moved, we imagine all kinds of things. We can think of things that do not exist, such as centaurs and Cerberus, and we can ‘feel’ happy or sad. What is the origin of these ideas and feelings? We tend to have ‘new ideas’ in the shower or on long walks, for example, in part because of the release of dopamine and other chemical transformations that we do not directly sense. Moving around literally changes our minds because our bodies are changing as well. Certain sounds, such as wind and water, can relax our bodies and make our minds more creative. The physical act of breathing increases oxygen and blood-flow to the body and brain and can create a feeling of well-being and literal inspiration, historically associated with the Muses. In short, material flows pass into and through our bodies in the form of physical, chemical, hormonal, molecular, and electrical affects that also move our minds. The imagination, for Lucretius, comes from nature in motion. The imagination is not just a ‘mental synthesis’ of two parts of the brain that have coordinated their neuronal firings to produce novel combinations (Sartre 2016: 4). This only begs the question of how and why such co-ordinations emerged in the first place. For Lucretius, this question is answered ecologically. Our imaginations and the movements of our minds are nature itself and are coordinated with other natural patterns. For example, when the narrator of Remembrance of Time Past smells a madeleine, it triggers the involuntary memory of his home in Combray. His brain and body then enter into a feedback loop from this initial sensation. The patterns of the body and mind do not transcend their material and ecological conditions but rather are feedback loops directly entrained with them. The question of how ‘we’ imagine and move well together should thus be understood as an ecological ‘we’ that is doing the imagining. Human ethics and mind are not extended to nature but rather habituated and coordinated enfoldings of nature itself. We see dead people and phantasms [simulacra] for precisely this reason. The neurons that fire together wire together. The more our bodies are in the habit of acting in certain ways and our brains are in the habit of firing in certain ways, the more likely we are to feel, see and imagine people who we saw or interacted with many times (4.757–62). Our bodies and minds are being 203

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affected in an incredible number of ways at once. However, Lucretius says, we only sense some and not others because of habits by ‘which the mind has prepared itself’. Thought and imagination are not ex nihilo products of an internal mind. They are kinetic patterns of action directly and physically shaped and habituated by nature. As such, ethics is not alien to nature, nor are its ideas ‘about’ nature. Aristotle was right to emphasize habit and practice as requisite of ethical life, but he was wrong to limit these practices to formal normative ‘virtues’ (brave, truthful, temperate, and so on) and to limit habit to human habits alone. Habits, for Lucretius, are ecological, physiological, architectural and atmospheric as well. Human habits of thinking and moving well are continuous with larger ambient patterns of motion in which they are enfolded. Therefore, ethics is not only about moving well together and not fearing/hating death but also about habituating oneself and/as the world at the same time. We move well together in reciprocal patterns.4 Moving well is thinking well.

12 Conclusion As a philosophical poet Lucretius offers a unique method and approach to defining ‘thinking’. All perceptions are true because perception is continuous with nature. Only if we assume a discontinuity between mind and nature or between mind and the other senses (representation) do we pose the unresolvable problem of a disconnected mind. In order to think well and live well, we need to avoid using the ‘twisted reasoning’ (4.832–35) he helps us overcome.

Notes 1 2 3 4

Rare exceptions include the Greek philosophical poets Xenophanes, Parmenides and Empedocles. All English translations are from Lucretius (2003). Serres writes, ‘The immortal eidos, unvarying and true, becomes, for him, error, and the lying eidolon, phantasmal and dead, becomes truth, tranquil appearance in a real world.’ For some excellent examples of this kind of ecological ethical symbiosis, see Kimmerer (2015).

References Barad, K. (2007) Meeting the University Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, Durham: Duke University Press. Bergson, H. (2005) Matter and Memory, New York: Zone Books. Fromm, E. (1968) The Revolution of Hope: Toward a Humanized Technology, New York: Harper & Row. Kimmerer, R. (2015) Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants, New York: Milkweed Editions. Kirby, V. (2018) Originary Humanicity: Locating Anthropos, Philosophia 8.1: 43–60. Lobel, T. (2016) Sensation: The New Science of Physical Intelligence, New York: Atria Books. Lucretius (2003) On the Nature of Things, (trans.) W. Englert, London: Focus Publishing. Marx, K. (1976) Capital, Vol. 1, New York: Penguin. Massumi, B. (2002) Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation, Durham: Duke University Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964) The Primacy of Perception, (ed. and trans.) J. M. Edie, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. and C. Lefort (1992) The Visible and the Invisible, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Nail, T. (2018a) Being and Motion, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nail, T. (2018b) Lucretius I: An Ontology of Motion, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Nail, T. (Forthcoming) Theory of the Object. Sartre, J. P. (2016) The Psychology of the Imagination, London: Routledge. Serres, M. and D. Webb (2000) The Birth of Physics, London: Clinamen Press.

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15 THINKING PHILOSOPHICALLY IN THE MIDDLE AGES The case of the early Franciscans Lydia Schumacher

1 Introduction The Middle Ages are often perceived as a time when there was no stark separation between philosophy and theology. To think philosophically was already to think theologically. This can leave the impression that the medievals were rather confused or backward when it came to understanding the distinct purview of the two disciplines. They simply did not know how to draw appropriate boundary lines between the fields, perhaps because they were so strongly motivated by their religious agendas to fit the proverbial philosophical square peg into the theological round hole. As a matter of fact, however, medieval thinkers had a relatively straightforward and consistent conception of the territory proper to the fields we would describe in terms of philosophy and theology. While theology deals with matters that pertain to God, philosophy treats things that are ‘not God’: the nature of reality, human nature, knowledge, will and so on. The reason philosophy and theology are always intertwined in this period, consequently, is because scholars operated on the assumption, inspired by the longstanding Neoplatonic tradition, that all things come from and thus derive their meaning and purpose from God in some way. What that way is can, of course, be defined by many different means, which is where the great diversity amongst medieval thinkers comes into play. For a long time, in any event, there was no perceived need to articulate an explicit difference between philosophy and theology, or even to define them as disciplines in their own right, precisely because the two fields dealt with what were effectively two sides of one coin: God and the relationship of all things to him. The first time that philosophical inquiry of a really concerted sort started to gain momentum was around the time of the great translation movement, which transpired between c. 1150–1250. During this period, the major works of Aristotle, previously unknown in the West, were translated into Latin, along with the works of Arab scholars who had enjoyed access to them for some centuries previous. The height of the translation movement coincided with the founding of the first universities around the turn of the thirteenth century. Most important of these for the present purposes was the University of Paris, the first chartered university in the West and the centre for the study of philosophy and theology in this period. At the young University of Paris, and later, Oxford, scholars working under the influence of the newly translated sources made it their mission for the first time in intellectual history to 205

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supplement their studies of God and the world with more technical assessments of all aspects of natural being and knowing such as they found in the recently translated texts. To this end, they delved into areas that had been dealt with only inchoately, if at all, by previous generations. In the process, they effectively invented the systematic disciplines of theology and philosophy, and their distinction. By the same token, they established the pedagogical practices through which such subjects would be taught in the university, many of which are still in use today. As it happens, the scholars I have in mind belonged primarily to the Franciscan order, which was founded by Francis of Assisi in 1209, with a mission to preach repentance and serve the poor. The rapid growth of the order—from 12 members in 1209 to around 5,000 by 1220—quickly created a need for training for the mostly lay new recruits. Though Franciscans had set up schools for this purpose since the 1230s, they benefited especially from the entrance into the order of some of the most reputed scholars of the day, above all, Alexander of Hales. As one of the most celebrated theologians at the University of Paris, Alexander made it his mission to establish the Franciscans as the leading lights in this context as well. This mission was not motivated by a mere lust for power, but by the felt need to fulfil what was quickly becoming the criterion for spiritual and intellectual authority in an increasingly literate society, namely, the capacity to articulate theological positions at the highest level of rigour within the most competitive of scholarly environment, that of the university. Partly, it was due to Alexander’s own prowess in this regard that his order came so strongly to dominate a university which was also home at the time to several major Dominican scholars, later including Thomas Aquinas, as well as the many so-called ‘secular’ masters who were priests, but not members of a specific religious order. In this contribution, my aim is to elucidate what it meant to think philosophically during a period in time when what it meant to think philosophically, at least in the West, was effectively being defined for the first time. The period on which I will focus, between around 1200–50, or even 1220–50, which is when the life of the university starts to exhibit some consistent rhythms, is admittedly not the one on which scholars have tended to focus in the past. The literature generally emphasises the so-called ‘greats’ of the next generation, such as Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure, or even the generation after them, which includes giants like John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham. By the time of such thinkers, pedagogical and methodological procedures—as well as philosophical party lines—mainly between Franciscans and Dominicans—had been clearly drawn out in the universities. These divisions obscure many of the assumptions and argumentative approaches they shared in common, which are important for grasping how medieval academics argued both during and beyond the first years of the university’s existence. In order to appreciate how scholars from this period thought philosophically, consequently, we must first look more closely at the circumstances surrounding the aforementioned translation movement and how it impacted the development of Latin thought, particularly in the Franciscan school. This will lead to a further inquiry regarding the way that scholars at this time and the Franciscans especially perceived and employed authoritative sources. A very common bias against medieval thinkers is that they did little but rehearse and defend arguments from authorities without advancing many original thoughts of their own. This could not be further from the truth, and it reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the way that medieval thinkers conceived the relationship between authoritative sources and their own innovations, which I will try to explain later on in this chapter through a case study in early Franciscan psychology. This study will help to illustrate how the contemporary reader should approach the interpretation of scholastic uses of authorities. At the same time, it will give a glimpse into the way scholastics puzzled over philosophical questions in relation to a 206

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theological point of reference. What will emerge as a result is that scholastic thinkers, not least Franciscans, were highly original thinkers who developed unique philosophical and theological positions by finding ‘proof texts’ within the tradition to legitimize their own opinions, more than those of the authorities quoted. This is quite an important point to stress, because early Franciscans more than most other schools of medieval thought have been accused and dismissed for generations for merely attempting to ‘systematize’ the work of Augustine, the presumed father of the Western intellectual tradition. To expose the innovativeness of early Franciscan thought is therefore to call into question some of the labels that have generally been applied to different scholastic schools, such as ‘Augustinian’, or ‘Aristotelian’.1 These emerge as a vast oversimplification of the realities they represent, to the point of being unhelpful and meaningless or even misleading. Indeed, the ultimate objective of my study of what it meant for scholastic thinkers to ‘think philosophically’ is to challenge the categories within which they have been presumed to do so and usher in a new phase in which texts from this period are taken on their own terms and recognized for the often novel contributions to the history of philosophy that they are.

2 The translation movement In standard accounts of Western intellectual history, the emergence of scholasticism in the early universities is generally linked to the recovery of Aristotle’s major works through the translation movement that spanned the latter half of the twelfth century and continued into the first half of the thirteenth (Van Steenberghen 1955). During precisely this period, however, access to Aristotle was limited and mitigated by various complex factors, as a result of which scholars had a very confused idea if any of his thought (Dales 1997). The hesitation around utilizing Aristotle was partly due to doubts about the quality of the Greco-Latin translations; and partly to the wide circulation of spurious Aristotelian works which were nonetheless attributed to Aristotle. Most important among these was the Liber de causis, the Neoplatonic sources of which were not recognized until Aquinas read William of Morebeke’s translation of Proclus’ Elements of Theology, which was produced in 1268. By many accounts, Aquinas also commissioned William in the 1250s and 60s to produce new and superior translations of Aristotle’s entire corpus for his own benefit. By this point, the commentaries on Aristotle by Averroes were also starting to be studied in earnest. Although these were introduced to Latin speakers around 1230, they appear to have been largely neglected until a better understanding of Aristotle became possible through the new translations (de Boer 2013: 17). Prior to the appearance of these texts from the 1250s, consequently, scholastic conceptions of natural philosophy relied primarily on the works of the Islamic scholar Avicenna, whose major works had been translated into Latin between 1152–66, well before the complete works of Aristotle were made available. Although Avicenna’s works bore the same titles as Aristotle’s works, they were not mere commentaries on Aristotle like those of Averroes. They were wholly original texts on key issues in metaphysics, psychology, and theology. In formulating his positions in these areas, Avicenna also drew extensively on the principles of Neoplatonic philosophy. Following a longstanding tradition of Greek and Arabic commentators, he held the two traditions—Aristotelian and Neoplatonic—to be fundamentally compatible. The support for this belief came in part from the so-called Theology of Aristotle, a work that actually reprises some key themes from Plotinus’ Enneads, but came down to Arab thinkers under the name of Aristotle. Although there were certainly obvious discrepancies between this more Platonic and indeed religious text and the genuine works of Aristotle, they were explained away on the assumption that the Theology 207

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represented the ‘unwritten doctrines’ of Plato that Aristotle had heard first-hand from his teacher and to which he had finally reconciled himself in his old age (D’Ancona 2017). That is not to say that Avicenna’s thought is merely a function of his Neoplatonism, however, for he parsed traditional Neoplatonic commitments entirely in his own way, even as he passed them off as a brand of Aristotelianism. Although Latin thinkers did not themselves possess the Theology of Aristotle, which was not translated until 1519, they had a variation on it in the aforementioned Liber de causis (D’Ancona 2012). This text furthered Latin thinkers’ own proclivity, inherited not least through Boethius, to read the Platonic and Aristotelian traditions in agreement. That in turn inclined them naturally to adopt Avicenna’s viewpoint as a legitimate reading of Aristotle, to the point of describing the two thinkers interchangeably as ‘the philosopher’ (Bertolacci 2012; Callus 1943). Their motivation to appropriate Avicenna was considerable, given that Avicenna far surpassed Aristotle or any other thinker in terms of what he had to offer by way of philosophical sophistication and scientific resources (Bertolacci 2011; Hasse 2001). Even after Aristotle’s entire oeuvre became fully available in the first quarter of the thirteenth century, consequently, Latin thinkers’ habitual dependence upon Avicenna proved difficult to discard. This was largely due to the Neoplatonic persuasions of Latin readers themselves, which were inherited through their own great authorities, such as Augustine, Boethius and Pseudo-Dionysius. Although these were towering figures in the medieval Latin West, they had not offered theological and philosophical systems of comparable rigour and complexity to Avicenna’s. Thus, Avicenna offered what seemed like the optimal resource for interpreting Christian Neoplatonic texts at the level of complexity that was now required. This was precisely the approach to reading traditional Western authorities, above all, Augustine, that was championed more than anywhere in the early Franciscan school. For them, it was just as easy to read Avicenna into Augustine as it was to read Avicenna into Aristotle, on account of spurious works that circulated under Augustine’s name, above all, the De anima et spiritu. This text was actually written by a twelfth-century Cistercian and represents a compilation of sources, whose eclectic nature rendered it amenable to an Avicennian interpretation (McGinn 1977: 25). Although the work was ascribed at various points to Bernard of Clairvaux, Hugh of St Victor, and others, only the attribution to Augustine eventually stuck (McGinn 1977: 68). Early Franciscans in particular persisted in associating the text with Augustine, despite doubts about its inauthenticity that were raised by Philip the Chancellor and Albert the Great, who noted the absence of any reference to the work in Augustine’s Retractationes, a work in which the Bishop lists and reflects on all his writings at the end of his career (Théry 1921: 376). By reading Augustine in an Avicennian way, early Franciscans succeeded in situating themselves at the cutting-edge of contemporary research, engaging with the most challenging and exciting new materials. At the time, this show of academic prowess was highly pertinent, given tensions that had arisen between the Franciscans and other scholars in the university who felt that the religious orders were usurping their authority and robbing them of their students and thus their jobs. The full-scale incorporation of Avicennian philosophy proved they had both the intellectual resources and thus the right to operate and indeed dominate in the university context. By the same token, it established the credibility and authority—spiritual, religious and intellectual—of the Franciscans in the face of the wider public and the church. This feat was accomplished nowhere more clearly than in the so-called Summa Halensis, which was a collaborative work on the part of the founders of the Franciscan school at Paris, above all, Alexander of Hales and his chief collaborator, John of La Rochelle. The project of composing this Summa was initiated by Alexander himself on his entrance into the order in 1236, near the end of his long and distinguished career in the University of Paris. As a leading 208

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figure in this context, Alexander played the instrumental role in establishing the academic practices that would continue to define university education in theology into early modernity. For instance, he instigated the practice of lecturing not only on the Bible but also on the theological themes treated in Lombard’s Sentences, effectively establishing the university discipline of systematic theology (Rosemann 2007). He himself was among the first to write a commentary on Lombard’s Sentences. Although this activity was controversial at first, he soon established it as the precursor to obtaining what was effectively the doctoral degree in the medieval university (Spatz 1997). For a long time, the Summa that bears Alexander’s name has been neglected on the basis of the widespread scholarly assumption that it is simply a rehash of Augustine’s thinking, indeed, the epitome thereof (Brady 1977; Doucet 1948; Ehrle 1918; Gilson 1955; Hamelin 1961; Vogt 1922). Another obstacle to its study concerns the difficulties involved in determining the precise author of each section. As the research of the Summa’s editors has shown, however, John of La Rochelle likely completed volumes 1 and 3, and a student of Alexander composed volumes 2.1 and 2.2 on the basis of works by John and Alexander (Doucet 1947). Together, these authors produced precisely what the Summa was intended from the start to be, namely, an internally consistent and doctrinally exhaustive account of the ‘collective mind’ of the early Franciscan school. This massive and monumental text was received as such a coherent whole at the time of John and Alexander’s deaths in 1245, upon which only the fourth volume on the sacraments, still unedited, remained to be written.2 Contrary to popular belief, this Summa was not left ‘incomplete’ in any real sense; no corrections and only two later additions were made to the 1245 version of the text. In many respects, this Summa was the first great instalment in a genre that would quickly become a defining feature of scholasticism; it was completed twenty years before Thomas Aquinas even set his hand to the task of writing his magisterial Summa Theologiae and serves as a structural and conceptual prototype for that work. A major reason why the size of the Summa Halensis mushroomed far beyond that of the few Summae that pre-date it is that it incorporated a comprehensive set of philosophical questions—mainly under the inspiration of Avicenna—into the scope of theological inquiry for the first time in intellectual history. Thus, the Summa was ultimately comprised of 3,408 questions where its most significant predecessor—the Summa aurea of William of Auxerre—includes only 808 (Even-Ezra 2020). The inclusion of so many philosophical questions represents a key respect in which the Summa Halensis would set the agenda for subsequent scholastic debate. Later thinkers like Aquinas would be compelled to address many of the questions it poses, even if they gave starkly different answers to them. What remains now is to consider the form or method that scholastics of this period used to deliver those answers.

3 The exigencies of scholastic method In her remarkable Book of Memory, Mary Carruthers enlightens us regarding the scholastic attitude towards auctoritates, or authorities. An authority, she states, was not an author per se, but a text; and a text was not perceived as a static entity but as something to be interpreted and extrapolated and digested by its reader. In turn, the interpretation of the reader, which is ineluctably designed to suit specific occasions or address specific questions, becomes part of the meaning of the text, ‘which is in a continual process of being understood, its plenitude of meaning being perfected and completed’ (Carruthers 1990: 235). As Carruthers notes, it is precisely the fact that the text generates further texts that renders it authoritative (Carruthers 1990: 262). 209

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These general yet incisive observations are borne out in fascinating ways in the actual reading of scholastic texts. As a matter of course, such texts proceed by way of marshalling authoritative quotations in favour of and against a particular position, after which the master or author resolves the question by defending one of the positions or the other, often with the invocation of more authorities. The version of the scholastic method codified by the Summists was a long time in the making, and it lies beyond the scope of this chapter to detail all the steps through which it evolved. The main forerunner worth mentioning here is Peter Lombard, whose Sentences organized key quotations from Scripture and the Church Fathers according to specific theological themes and topics, proceeding from the doctrine of God to creation, incarnation and sacraments. In this way, Lombard established a systematic approach to treating questions of faith that was still exceptional at a time when Christian authors worked primarily through the genre of biblical commentary and spiritual writings. The method of marshalling authoritative quotations which Lombard solidified has to some extent understandably led modern readers to take the quotations at face value, and thus to regard scholastic texts as more or less the sum or function of their sources. Thus, a positive reference to Augustine, Hugh of St Victor or Boethius is often supposed to indicate allegiance to these authorities on the specific points in question. As noted earlier, however, the concern of scholastics in quoting authorities was not simply to reiterate or defend the views of past authorities but to press them in new directions of the scholastic author’s own devising. Therein lay the originality of scholastic texts, which remains hidden to the extent their arguments are reduced to those of the authorities they quoted. Each of these authorities stood for a cause with which the scholastic author presumably wanted to associate himself, in order to legitimize his own opinions on a matter. To quote Richard of Saint Victor or Dionysius, consequently, was to elaborate new dimensions of the mystical tradition: Boethius, the logical. To quote Augustine, the ‘authority of authorities’, was to declare one’s own positions consistent with the dominant form of the Christian intellectual tradition. There is a nice example from the Summa Halensis, which illustrates how this worked in practice. An introductory question on the knowledge of God contains seventy references to Augustine, who is by far the most quoted authority in this section; thirty-four of these references are to Augustine’s ep. 147 and often to the same passages from it. Interestingly, these selections are used in both the ‘pro’ and ‘contra’ as well as ‘respondeo’ and ‘ad objecta’ sections. By placing Augustine in an argument with himself, the Summists clearly did not intend to interpret or bolster Augustine’s own views, but used him as a cipher for their own efforts to consider different sides of a matter on which they ultimately sought to present their own position, which was derived from the De anima et spiritu. The reason for citing Augustine so disproportionally in this instance is not stated and can only be inferred from an understanding of the immediate historical context. At the time, there was a spike in the popularity of Greek patristic sources, which denied the possibility of ever seeing the essence of God, a position that had actually been condemned in 1241. Augustine had held such a vision to be possible in the life to come. By quoting Augustine, therefore, even to defend a position regarding the knowledge of God which was not his, the authors of the Summa located themselves on the right side of ecclesial authority and sidestepped the condemnation. Although Alexander held the condemned position at an earlier point in his career, he served on the commission that issued the condemnation, during or after which time his view was revised in the Summa Halensis. As this suggests, scholastic authors did not always possess perfectly worked out or consistent positions and were themselves prepared to recognize this. Like scholars today, they were capable of confusion and even of error. The irony is that refusing to acknowledge this—generally out of a religious reverence for the great thinkers of the 210

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church—hinders the ability to grasp the thought of the author who is so highly revered. The kinds of revisions that can be detected in the career of Alexander of Hales—and which are manifest in many works through the study of their manuscript traditions—are not the only complications that present themselves to the student of scholasticism, however. There are many cases where an author refers to a position, without naming its source, perhaps out of a sense of politeness, or to avoid objecting to an authority or even a colleague by name. Similarly, the view of one authority was sometimes ascribed to another who was perceived as ‘more authoritative’. We see this in the 1240s as the burden increases for scholastics to engage directly with Aristotle, no longer by way of Avicenna. Earlier, scholars had simply quoted Avicenna without even trying to pay lip service to the interpretation of Aristotle. As time went on, they felt compelled to find a way to combine Avicenna and Aristotle. This was something they did either implicitly, by projecting an Avicennian concept on to Aristotle without mentioning Avicenna at all; or explicitly, with a statement like, ‘this is how we should read Aristotle, namely, according to Avicenna’. The situation becomes especially complicated in cases where a given author, for example, a Franciscan one, made special efforts to identify his own idea with the position of certain authorities like Anselm or Augustine, thereby ‘commandeering’ the authority for personal ends. Later on, we find Aquinas raising objections to Anselm, for instance, that are clearly objections to his Franciscan contemporaries’ uses of the Benedictine’s writings. This fact often goes unnoticed by scholars who assume Aquinas is directly objecting to Anselm. The reason why a face-value reading of scholastic texts can be deceiving is that obscures cases like this where there is more than meets the eye to scholastic appeals to authorities. As we have seen, the biggest reason why scholastics invoked authorities was to bolster their own ‘definite, independent and sometimes partisan views’ (Colish 1997: 19), ‘to marshal support from them for their own campaigns’ (Colish 1997: 11). However, the task of deciphering what those campaigns were and the motives behind them can become quite complex and usually involves addressing a wide range of preliminary questions which can vary from text to text and context to context. These questions inevitably pertain to the historical circumstances that informed a particular topic of discussion; the sources that were available to the author addressing it; the contemporaries with whom the author may have been in dialogue implicitly, and so on. A final but far from insignificant factor to take into account when interpreting any particular scholastic text is the whole of which it is a part. Famously, scholastic authors constructed large and comprehensive systems, which included relatively brief sections on a wide range of topics. These are easily and all-too-often excised from their broader context and thus interpreted without reference to the fundamental principles and assumptions—metaphysical, psychological, theological—that underlie and are conveyed across many sections of the greater text. While it can be tempting to mine scholastic texts in this piecemeal way, it is crucial to approach them with an awareness of the integrated manner in which they were written, with every doctrine dependent upon numerous others in providing a holistic picture of reality. As these few examples confirm, reading scholastic texts is not always as straightforward as their seemingly simple structure and method of quoting authorities might seem to suggest. Rather, it takes the sheer determination and detective skills to explore the inner workings of a period in which ‘everyone could use the tradition as he chose’ (Bougerol 1997: 289).

4 Case study: early Franciscan psychology To illustrate this point, I would like now to pursue some case studies in the field of early Franciscan psychology, which encapsulate nicely some of the idiosyncrasies of scholastic 211

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method that I have described earlier. At the same time, they highlight how scholars at this time undertook philosophical thinking in relation to a theological point of reference and for theological reasons. The first philosophical topic worth mentioning here is the question of the soul’s relationship to the body. This is a topic that Augustine had famously left unresolved, affirming in some places that the soul is intimately connected with the body; while suggesting elsewhere that it can be separated from it.3 Ultimately, he never managed to explain the relationship between the two and seems to have regarded it as something of a mystery (McGinn 1977: 8). This, therefore, was one area where philosophical clarity was desperately needed, which Avicenna’s philosophy promised to provide. Famously, Avicenna regarded the body and the soul as two separate substances, the second of which goes on existing after the death of the body (Bazàn 1969, 1997: 104). On his understanding, consequently, the relationship between the body and soul is purely accidental—it holds only temporarily, during this present life. Although the soul itself is entirely simple, the body is comprised of its own kind of ‘form of corporeity’, printed on prime matter, which is what renders it a substance in its own right. By this account, therefore, the soul is not what makes the body a body but only what makes it actually living. The body is responsible for its own form.4 In the Middle Ages, Franciscans found this idea attractive because it allowed them to affirm that the dead body of Christ was still his body. It also guaranteed the resurrection of the self-same body at the end of time. The Halensian Summist, following John of La Rochelle in his earlier Summa de anima, enthusiastically adopted this position as an interpretation of Augustine. Since Augustine’s own texts were so ambivalent on the matter, the Summists turned instead to the pseudo-Augustinian texts which were very clear in positing a substantial distinction between the soul and the body. This is true not only of the De spiritu et anima but also of the popular De ecclesiasticis dogmatibus, written by Gennadius Massiliensis (d. 496), both of which are quoted in the early Franciscan context (Dales 1995: 4–5).5 As Magdalena Bieniak has shown, however, these scholars did not leave Avicenna’s doctrine entirely unamended, but supplemented it with an idea from their Dominican contemporary Hugh of St Cher, who argued that the body is in fact intrinsic to the substance of the soul, which exhibits the quality of ‘unibilitas substantialis’ or a substantial unitability to the body (Bieniak 2010: 26; Bieniak 2004: 169). This idea was crucial for affirming not only the resurrection of the body but also the value of the human body as part of God’s creation. Although some scholastics before Hugh entertained a more purely Avicennian idea of the body-soul relationship, they quickly realised that this was out of step with their own Christian commitments.6 The account of this issue becomes even more interesting, however, when we realise that the Halensian Summists, following John, attribute an Avicennian account of the body-soul relationship not only to Augustine but also to Aristotle. This is particularly remarkable given that Aristotle seems to have defended exactly the opposite position to Avicenna. On his account, the soul is the form of the body, which implies both that the soul cannot exist without a body—having a body is part of what it means to be human—and that the soul ceases to exist at the death of the body. This is generally taken to be the upshot of Aristotle’s famous definition of the soul in De anima II.1, 412a18–19, which describes the soul as the ‘form of the natural organic body having the potential for life’.7 In this period, scholars had available to them not only the translation of Aristotle from Greek but also the translation from Arabic. There was a slight discrepancy between the two translations in that the latter substituted the term ‘perfection’ for the term ‘form’ which was in the Greco-Latin original. This eased the way for early scholastics and indeed Franciscans to read Aristotle in line with Avicenna, who had used the term ‘perfection’ to explain his particular 212

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understanding of the soul’s relationship with the body (Bieniak 2010: 14). The discrepancy was by and large not lost on early scholastics, who saw the tension between the two terms, namely, form and perfection. However, John of La Rochelle and the Summists following him found clever ways effectively to explain the problem away. In his Summa de anima, John in one breath calls the soul both the form and the perfection of the body.8 He justifies his use of technically contradictory terms by explaining that there are three different ways to understand a form.9 The first kind of form, found for example in inanimate bodies like rocks, is totally supported by matter and does not rule or sustain it but is sustained by it. The second kind of form depends upon matter and rules it but can only operate through it, as in the case of plants and animals. According to John, however, the situation is entirely different for the human soul, interpreted as the form of the body. For although the soul rules its matter, which in turn depends upon it, its principal operation is not in matter but in itself, that is, in the work of the rational soul, the proper function of which is to abstract from matter. For this reason, it is not contradictory to say that in this particular case, the form of the body is also a perfection which is by definition separable from the body. A variation on this same argument is subsequently presented in the Summa Halensis to justify the conflation of the terms ‘form’ and ‘perfection’.10 The example of the body-soul union nicely illustrates therefore how early Franciscans drew on Avicenna not only to interpret Augustine, or at least pseudo-Augustine, but also to interpret Aristotle, and indeed, to present a reading that left Augustine and Aristotle effectively in agreement with one another. Here, as we have seen, Aristotle is pressed into affirming a quintessentially Neoplatonic idea of the body and soul as separate substances, which he himself did not affirm. The Avicennian rendering of this idea was promoted because it presumably suited the Franciscans’ own theological ends, albeit with adaptations, and because utilizing it allowed them to achieve a level of philosophical sophistication that was unmatched in prior Latin tradition. There are other examples from early Franciscan psychology that illustrate the lengths to which scholar-members of the order would go to justify their desired readings. These emerge quite clearly in the Halensian Summist’s account of human rational cognition, which also builds on the theories presented by John of La Rochelle in the Summa de anima. In that text, John had lifted almost verbatim the theories of Avicenna on the human cognitive powers, external sensation, internal sensation or imagination, and the work of the intellect itself. Dag Hasse has explained why John and others in this period exhibited a tendency to adopt Avicenna’s theories in these respects: they were by far the most philosophically and scientifically complex to date and had no rival in the Christian tradition (Hasse 2001: 189–91). In brief, Avicenna holds that the common sense is that which receives forms imprinted by the five external senses and gives us a unified picture of their different aspects.11 The imagination retains those forms after they are no longer directly accessible by experience. The excogitative sense is able to compose and divide the different accidents attached to a given form. Estimation registers what is beneficial or harmful in the forms perceived, while the fifth internal sense of the memory apprehends and retains the product of estimation, that is, the intentions of sensible things, the images of things with their connotational attributes or positive or negative connotations. The Summa Halensis basically repeats this account of the internal senses.12 After detailing the work of each of these faculties, the Summa seeks to justify its interest in Avicenna in relation to pseudo-Augustine as well as John of Damascus, the eighth-century Greek Church Father who was increasingly becoming a theological authority following the translation of his De fide orthodoxa in the mid-twelfth century. According to John of Damascus, the Summa notes, there are three facets of the sensitive soul, namely, imagination, 213

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excogitation, and memory.13 The imagination is located in the front of the brain and captures images of sense objects apart from matter; the memory is in the back of the brain and retains those images; the excogitative power is in the middle and composes and divides different features of imaged objects. On this basis, the Summist concludes that the Damascene’s three powers basically perform the functions described by Avicenna in delineating his five internal senses.14 While his imagination performs an apprehending function, his excogitative faculty seemingly performs the functions that could be attributed to the imaginative faculty and estimation, and his memory performs the work that is assigned to the phantasia and the sense memory.15 This conclusion leads to a more general question whether Avicenna’s five-fold and Damascus’ three-fold account of the internal senses can both be contained under pseudo-Augustine’s category of imagination, which is part of a list of five faculties of sense, imagination, ratio, intellectus and intelligencia. This distinction is partly traceable to Augustine’s authentic works, such as De Genesi ad litteram, where ratio corresponds to corporeal vision, or external sensation; intellectus to spiritual vision or imagination; and intelligentia to intellectual cognition (Schumacher 2011: 34–39). In the De spiritu et anima, however, which is the actual source for the three-fold distinction in the Summa Halensis, the functions of these faculties are interpreted in an entirely different way. Here, the work of corporeal and spiritual vision is respectively assigned to sense and imagination, while ratio knows things below and including the self, intellectus knows angels, and intelligence knows God. In this context, the actual facts of Augustine’s own account are of little interest. The goal is to show that Avicenna’s monumental theory of the five internal senses can be reduced to the three-fold theory of John of Damascus and that both can ultimately be conflated with pseudoAugustine’s category of imagination. Since this faculty deals broadly with sensible forms absent matter and the various faculties mentioned by John and Avicenna do the same in different ways, supplementing Augustine with Avicenna’s complex theory in particular is perceived by the Summists as entirely unproblematic.16 The last example I want to give of Augustine’s reception in relation to Aristotle, Avicenna, and indeed John of Damascus concerns the work of the intellect. In his Summa de anima, John of La Rochelle once again unabashedly articulated a straightforwardly Avicennian theory on this score, invoking Avicenna’s signature doctrine of the four stages of potential for knowing in the intellect.17 The first so-called material intellect has the possibility of knowing all things. The second intellect in effectu possesses the disposition to know which consists in the innate first principles of knowledge, such as that the whole is greater than a part. The third is the intellectus in habitu, which has drawn conclusions from those principles about actual realities, but is not considering them at the moment. The fourth is the intellectus adeptus, which is considering conclusions in actual fact. It is well known that Avicenna believed that the so-called active or agent intellect, which makes the work of the intellectus adeptus possible, was actually God, with whom the human possible intellect must make contact every time it knows, in precisely the four stages of the possible intellect mentioned earlier. Although some Franciscans adhered to the idea of God as the agent intellect, John is not one of them, nor is the author of the Summa Halensis. For both, following the De spiritu et anima, God only serves as the agent intellect when he himself is the object of knowledge. This is because he is out of the reach of the human mind.18 Likewise, angels must serve as the agent intellect in our knowledge of angels. When it comes to the knowledge of the self or things below the self, however, these Franciscans are quite emphatic that the human mind is self-sufficient. 214

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Whereas, John simply laid out Avicenna’s doctrine of the intellect in detail alongside the theories of the Damascene and Augustine, as if that alone was self-explanatory in terms of reconciling them, the Summa takes a slightly more pro-active approach, highlighting all the conceivable points of contact between the three theories with the ultimate goal of showing that the pseudo-Augustinian triad of ratio, intellectus, intelligentia which respectively know things below, beside, and above the self, provides a broad umbrella under which all the other schemata can be incorporated. The schemes of Damascus and Avicenna are fitted in under the auspices of the notion of ratio, which is responsible for knowing the self and things below it. The Summa deals first with John of Damascus’ four-fold scheme of intelligence, intention, excogitation, and phronesis. According to the Summa’s interpretation, intelligence is the act of the intellectual power of grasping something; intentio is intelligence about or understanding of something, excogitation is the preliminary movement of reason to gain understanding, and phronesis is the consequent movement of reason to draw a conclusion about what is to be understood.19 Although the Damascene gave his own meaning to these four terms, the Summa basically disregards this in order to argue that they represent precisely the four acts performed by Avicenna’s four intellects.20 In other words, the Summa re-defines the meaning of intelligence so that it corresponds to the material intellect; intentio to intellect in effect; excogition to intellect in habit and phronesis to intellectus adeptus.21 Remarkably, Aristotle also finds a home in this picture, which represents a new development from John of La Rochelle, who does not mention the Stagirite. The ten or fifteen years between the time John wrote the Summa de anima and the early 1240s when the section in question of the Summa Halensis was probably written accounts for this difference, in that pressure was increasing by this time to engage with Aristotle, even though resources remained thin on the ground for doing so. Indeed, the intellectual schema that the Summa attributes to Aristotle does not come from Aristotle at all. This scheme includes the material intellect, which in this context is another term for the imagination, as the power which possesses that on the basis of which abstraction is performed, that is, an image of a sense object; the possible intellect, or the power that performs the act of abstracting an image from all material conditions; and the agent intellect, which comprehends abstract forms or universals.22 The source of this three-fold schema has been the focus of much debate of the past century, with some insisting it comes from a superficial reading of Averroes, whose works were introduced between 1225–30, and some denying that this is possible (Callus 1952: 145; Salman 1947–48: 143). However, that attribution is called into question by the fact that John of La Rochelle associated this scheme with Avicenna, who also did not adhere to it exactly. According to Bazàn, the scheme of material-possible-agent intellect is in fact the unique product of early Latin scholastic attempts to synthesise the new natural philosophy (Bazàn 2000: 36). This points to a phenomenon in this period of attributing to ‘The Philosopher’, just about any view that the early scholastic found compelling. In that sense, the Philosopher was more or less a construct whose presumed thought contained many authentic and accurate aspects of Avicenna’s thought in particular but was not entirely reducible to it and included insights from other philosophers as well. According to the Summa, this Philosopher pursues with his three-fold scheme of material, possible and agent intellect the intelligible forms that Augustine’s faculty of ratio beholds. Within the pseudo-Augustinian framework, consequently, there is room not only for John of Damascus to be invoked as a means of smuggling in Avicenna’s doctrine of the four possible intellects but also for an Aristotelian theory of the intellect which did not really belong to Aristotle at all. The technique of argumentation employed here is quite remarkable in that the 215

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Summa author manages in what we might regard as a typical scholastic fashion to harmonize all of his sources and make them agree or at least supplement on some level the thought of Augustine. What these examples illustrate, however, is that most of the sources in question are effaced or distorted significantly in the process. This is not surprising, for we have learned that the point of scholastic method was never necessarily to present authorities’ views accurately in the first place, but to use them as a launching pad or catalyst for the author’s own original vision, which was legitimized and given credence through the sources’ invocation.

5 Thinking philosophically in the Middle Ages This brings us back to the original question of what it means to think philosophically in the Middle Ages. In the earlier examples, I have aimed to highlight some of the tendencies referred to in the first part of the chapter, such as the habit of using spurious sources to justify readings of major authorities like Augustine and Aristotle that cannot be found in these sources themselves. Of special importance in this regard, we have learned, was the philosophy of Avicenna. This allowed early Franciscans to achieve a level of sophistication in describing the things that are ‘not God’ and their relationship to God that was foreign to earlier Latin tradition and thus to assert their primacy in the university context. By the same token, it invited them to establish clearer boundaries between philosophy and theology as disciplines, which were nonetheless always related in this period. In this regard, there appears to have been a sort of happy coincidence between Avicenna’s thinking and certain aspects of the Franciscan religious ethos. As I have elaborated elsewhere, Avicenna allowed the founders of Franciscan thought to articulate the human being’s relationship to the world and the nature of human knowledge, including knowledge of God, in ways that resonated with Francis of Assisi’s vision of God and reality (Schumacher 2019). This vision is part of the backstory that is necessary to understand in order to grasp why Franciscans used the sources and defended the positions they did. As we have seen, their sources are not always easy to detect, as sometimes they are referred to merely under the name of ‘the Philosopher’, whose identity can only be discerned through acquaintance with all the philosophical texts that were available to Franciscans at the time. This is especially true insofar as quoting Avicenna fell out of fashion as Aristotle came increasingly to the fore. By the next generation, he largely ceased to be referred to at all, for instance, in Bonaventure, who simply and perhaps unwittingly continued to peddle his views under the name of Augustine. On this basis, generations of scholars have described early Franciscans as ‘Augustinians’ when in fact their relationship to Augustine is quite tenuous. As I have shown, they made a new synthesis of their own out of Avicenna and other sources, justifying this through points of contact with the Latin and Greek theological traditions, as they were obliged at the time to do. To be aware of their creativity is to alter completely how we think about them and scholastics more generally—not as synthesizers of the past but as harbingers of the future development of Western philosophy.

Notes 1 The use of these terms in the literature is ubiquitous, but some influential sources of the labels include Ehrle (1918) and Gilson (1955). 2 The coherence of the work has been emphasized by Gössmann (1964). 3 McGinn (1977): 8, citing Augustine, De ordine II.11.31, De quantitatae animae I.25.47. De civitate dei IV.13, IX.9–10, X.6, De moribus ecclesiasticae catholicae I.4.6 and I.2752; In Iohannes Evangelium 19.5.15. 4 Avicenna Latinus (1972): I.4.

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SH 2.1, In4, Tr1, S1, Q3, Ti2, C1, Ar1, Contra a, b, 418. John of La Rochelle, Summa de anima, 52. Summa de anima, 53, citing De spiritu et anima 6. John of La Rochelle, Summa de anima, 126. John of La Rochelle, Summa de anima, 124–25. SH 2.1, In4, Tr1, S1, Q2, Ti1, C3, Ar1, Solution, 394. Avicenna Latinus (1968), IV.1. SH 2.1, In4, Tr1, S2, Q1, C4, Ar1, I, p. 438. Saint John Damascene, ed. Butyaert (1955), II, 17, 19, 20. SH 2.1, In4, Tr1, S2, Q2, Ti1, M2, C1, b, 434, citing Avicenna’s De anima IV.1 and IV.2. SH 2.1, In4, Tr1, S2, Q2, Ti1, M2, C4, A2, Solutio, 439. SH 2.1, In4, Tr1, S2, Q2, Ti1, M1, C2, Contra 1, 435. SH 2.1, In4, Tr1, S2, Q3, Ti1, M2, C4, Ar3, Ad objecta 3, 459. See also Avicenna, De anima V.6. John of La Rochelle, Summa de anima, 277-9. SH 2.1, In4, Tr1, S2, Q3, Ti1, M2, C1, Solutio III, 450. SH 2.1, In4, Tr1, S2, Q3, Ti1, M2, C4, Ar3, Ad objecta 2, 459. SH 2.1, In4, Tr1, S2, Q3, Ti1, M2, C4, Ar3, 458. SH 2.1, In4, Tr1, S2, Q3, Ti1, M2, C4, Ar3, Ad objecta 3, 459. SH 2.1, In4, Tr1, S2, Q3, Ti1, M1, C1, Solutio, 448.

References Alexander of Hales. (1924–48) Doctoris irrefragabilis Alexandri de Hales Ordinis minorum Summa theologica, 4 vols., Quaracchi, Florentiae: Collegii S. Bonaventurae = Summa Halensis (SH). Anonymous. De spiritu et anima. (1977) PL XL, coll. 779–832, in B. Clark (trans.), Three Treatises on Man: A Cistercian Anthropology, Kalamazoo: Cistercian Press. Avicenna Latinus: Liber de Anima seu Sextus de Naturalibus IV–V. (1968) (ed.) S. Van Riet, Leiden: Brill. Bazàn, B. C. (1969) Pluralism de formes ou dualism de substances? La pensée pré-thomiste touchant la nature de l’ame, Revue philosophique de Louvain 67: 30–73. Bazàn, B. C. (1997) The Human Soul: Form and Substance? Thomas Aquinas’ Critique of Eclectic Aristotelianism, Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du Moyen Age 64: 95–126. Bazàn, B. C. (2000) Was There Ever a First Averroism?, in J. A. Aertsen and A. Speer (eds.), Geistesleben im 13. Jahrhundert, Berlin: Gruyter, 31–53. Bertolacci, A. (2011) A Community of Translators: The Latin Medieval Versions of Avicenna’s Book of the Cure, in C. J. Mews and J. N. Crossley (eds.), Communities of Learning: Networks and the Shaping of Intellectual Identity in Europe 1100–1500, Turnhout: Brepols, 37–54. Bertolacci, A. (2012) On the Latin Reception of Avicenna’s Metaphysics before Albertus Magnus: An Attempt at Periodization, in D. N. Hasse and A. Bertolacci (eds.), The Arabic, Hebrew and Latin Reception of Avicenna’s Metaphysics, Berlin: De Gruyter. Bieniak, M. (2004) Una questione disputata di ugo di St Cher sull’anima edizione e studio dottrinale, Studia Antyczne I Mediewistyczne 37: 127–184. Bieniak, M. (2010) The Soul-Body Problem at Paris 1200–50: Hugh of St Cher and His Contemporaries, Leuven: Leuven University Press. Bougerol, J.-G. (1997) The Church Fathers and Auctoritates in Scholastic Theology to Bonaventure, in I. Backus (ed.), The Reception of the Church Fathers in the West: From the Carolingians to the Maurists, Vol. 1, Leiden: Brill, 289–335. Brady, I. (1977) The Summa Theologica of Alexander of Hales (1924–1948), Archivum Franciscanum Historicum 70: 437–447. Callus, D. A. (1943) Introduction of Aristotelian Learning to Oxford, Proceedings of the British Academy 29: 229–281. Callus, D. A. (1952) The Powers of the Soul: An Early Unpublished Text, Recherches de Théologie ancienne et médiévale 19: 131–170. Carruthers, M. (1990) The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Colish, M. L. (1997) The Sentence Collection and the Education of Professional Theologians in the Twelfth Century, in N. van Deusen (ed.), The Intellectual Climate of the Early University, Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1–26.

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Lydia Schumacher Dales, R. C. (1995) The Problem of the Rational Soul in the Thirteenth Century, Leiden: Brill. Dales, R. C. (1997) The Understanding of Aristotle’s Natural Philosophy by the Early Scholastics, in N. van Deusen (ed.), The Intellectual Climate of the Early University: Essays in Honor of Otto Gründler, Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, 141–150. D’Ancona, C. (2012) The Textual Tradition of the Graeco-Arabic Plotinus, in A. M. I. van Oppenraaii (ed.), The Letter Before the Spirit: The Importance of Text Traditions for the Study of the Reception of Aristotle, Leiden: Brill, 37–71. D’Ancona, C. (2017) The Theology Attributed to Aristotle: Sources, Structure, Influence, in S. Schmidtke and K. El-Rouayheb (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Islamic Philosophy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 8–29. de Boer, S. (2013) The Science of the Soul: The Commentary Tradition on Aristotle’s De anima c. 1260–1360, Leuven: Leuven University Press. Doucet, V. (1947) The History of the Problem of the Summa, Franciscan Studies 7: 26–41, 274–312. Doucet, V. (1948) Prolegomena in librum III necnon in libros I et II Summa Fratris Alexandri, in Alexandri de Hales Summa Theologica, Quaracchi: Collegii S Bonaventurae. Ehrle, F. (1918) Grundsätzliches zur Charakteristik der neueren und neuesten Scholastik, Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder. Even-Ezra, A. (2020) The Summa Halensis: A Text in Context, in L. Schumacher (ed.), The Summa Halensis: Sources and Context, Berlin: De Gruyter. Gilson, É. (1955) History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages, New York: Random House. Gössmann, E. (1964) Metaphysik und Heilsgeschichte: Eine theologische Untersuchung der Summa Halensis (Alexander von Hales), Munich: Max Hueber. Hamelin, A.-M. (1961) L’école franciscaine de ses débuts jusqu’a l’occamisme, Analecta medievalia Namurcensia, Louvain: Nauwelaerts. Hasse, D. N. (2001) Avicenna’s De Anima in the Latin West, London: The Warburg Institute. John of La Rochelle. (1995) Summa de anima, (ed.) J. G. Bougerol, Paris: Vrin. McGinn, B. (1977) Introduction, in Three Treatises on Man, Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1–100. Rosemann, P. W. (2007) The Story of a Great Medieval Book: Peter Lombard’s Sentences, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Saint John Damascene. (1955) De fide orthodoxa: Versions of Burgundio and Cerbanus, (ed.) E. M. Buytaert, St Bonaventure: Franciscan Institute. Salman, D. H. O. P. (1947–48) Jean de La Rochelle et les débuts de l’Averroïsme Latin, Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du Moyen Age, 133–144. Schumacher, L. (2011) Divine Illumination: The History and Future of Augustine’s Theory of Knowledge, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Schumacher, L. (2019) Early Franciscan Theology: Between Authority and Innovation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Spatz, N. (1997) Approaches and Attitudes to a New Theology Textbook: The Sentences of Peter Lombard, in N. van Deusen (ed.), The Intellectual Climate of the Early University, Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 27–52. Théry, G. (1921) L’authenticité du De spiritu et anima dans Saint Thomas et Albert le Grand, Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques 10: 373–377. Van Steenberghen, F. (1955) The Philosophical Movement in the Thirteenth Century, Edinburgh: Nelson. Vogt, B. (1922) Der Ursprung und die Entwicklung der Franziskanerschule, Franziskanische Studien 9: 137–157.

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16 THE ‘THOUGHT-WORK’; OR, THE EXUBERANCE OF THINKING IN KANT AND FREUD Stella Sandford

1 Introduction What, for Kant, is it to think philosophically? And if this is a species or a speciality of a generic capacity, what is thinking in general? The logic of Kant’s position on the power of reason suggests that philosophical thinking is a capacity of all rational beings, not just of philosophers, and indeed that it requires no special training.1 Philosophical thinking is the exercise of the rational faculty in relation to its transcendental ideas and pure principles, and philosophy (the production of which does require training) is the articulation of the limits and legitimate employment of these ideas and principles and the communication of the results of this employment considered systematically. As it is also thanks to reason, according to Kant, that we can think more than we can know, neither philosophical thinking nor philosophy can be identical with knowledge; indeed, they are characterised by their speculating beyond knowledge, for good or ill. The faculty of reason discovers the transcendental conditions of possibility for knowledge and thus performs its own self-critique in philosophising. With the legitimate employment of its ideas and principles it also provides the condition of possibility for scientific, that is systematic, thinking. But as the Transcendental Dialectic also teaches, reason tends to overstep its critical limits and leads thought astray. This is still philosophical thinking and philosophy, but not justified philosophical thinking and philosophy. With respect to all of these aspects—reason’s thinking as selfcritique, reason’s thinking with its ideas and principles, and reason’s transgression of its critical limits—the mark of philosophical thinking is its ‘purity’; its freedom (in principle and in fact, according to Kant) from empirical constraint. But what about thinking in general? In this chapter, I will argue that this is for Kant an anthropological question, with implications for the presumed model of philosophical thinking outlined earlier. In several works generally seen as peripheral to his critical project, Kant embarked on a sustained and generally consistent attempt to identify, analyse and explain what at first sight seem to be the para-phenomena of his faculty philosophy: dreams, visions and various forms of mental disturbance and madness. Kant characterises these phenomena as empirical problems with the functions of the faculties of sensibility (including imagination), understanding and reason. Concentrating especially on the misfiring or malfunctioning of reason and understanding, this chapter will consider how these disturbances are related to the proper 219

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functioning of the faculties—that is, how Kant sees this relation, but also how Kant’s official view of things may be questioned. This problem is not concerned with the doctrine of the transcendental elements of those faculties (the pure forms of space and time; the pure concepts or categories; and, arguably, the pure ideas of reason) but with the work (or workings) of the higher cognitive faculties, especially—understanding and reason. Kant’s explanation of mental disturbance as having its origin in the body is an attempt, this chapter will argue, to separate the various forms of madness and disturbances of thought from the proper working of the higher cognitive faculties and from philosophical thinking, including philosophical error. This chapter will dispute that separation. It first (Section 2) lays out Kant’s distinction, in his ‘Essay on the Maladies of the Head’, between the three forms of madness associated with the faculties of sensibility, understanding and reason, respectively. It then (Section 3) considers the problematic relation of these forms of madness with metaphysics (especially in Dreams of a Spirit-Seer Elucidated by Dreams of Metaphysics), which leaves us with the question of the nature of the perversion of understanding and reason and the relation of their faulty to their ‘correct’ forms. Section 4 suggests, on the basis of a linguistic and topical kinship, that this question can be approached via Freud’s work on the psychopathology of everyday life. On the model of the ‘dream-work’ and the ‘joke-work’ in Freud’s writings, this chapter will speculate that we can think of thinking in general in terms of the subjective ‘thought-work’, and it will consider how this conception of thought in general must necessarily have implications for how we can think about philosophical thought.

2 Kant’s psychopathology In 1764, in his so-called pre-critical period, Kant published a short, curious work called ‘Essay on the Maladies of the Head’. At the beginning, it appears to be a fairly light-hearted work of social satire, in keeping with the attempts at popular philosophy that occupied this period of his work. Characterising his times in terms of the ‘punsters’ and ‘subtler reasoners’, the ‘fools’ and ‘swindlers’ who thrive when ‘artificial constraint’ and ‘the luxury of a civil constitution’ replace the ‘simplicity and frugality of nature’ (the influence of Rousseau is clear) he sounds more like an eighteenth-century Elvis Costello than the author of The Critique of Pure Reason. He writes that he lives ‘among wise and well-mannered citizens, that is to say, among those who are skilled at appearing so’, in the lap of a civilisation which gives birth to the wise or decent semblance by means of which one can dispense with understanding as well as integrity, if only the beautiful veil which decency spreads over the secret frailties of the head or the heart is woven close enough. When, Kant implies, real cures for these frailties are derided as old-fashioned rubbish, and the fashionable cures of the ‘doctors of the understanding, who call themselves logicians’ (Kant 2007a: 65) satisfy public demand, far be it from him to demur. Instead, he says, he will follow the method of the physicians, ‘who believe they have been very helpful to their patient when they give his malady a name, and will sketch a small onomastic [a study of names] of the frailties of the head’ (2007a: 66). The rush of categories that follow—the imbecile, the madman, the idiot, the fool, the dull head and so on—are thus presented as a kind of satirical game of classification. The essay begins by describing the ‘milder degrees’ of the frailties of the head, from ‘idiocy to foolishness’, frailties which are ‘despised and scoffed at’ because they are the result of being made stupid by civilisation and miseducation. But it then broaches what appears to be a more 220

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serious discussion of ways in which a person can be actually ill. These are frailties ‘in which official care provision takes an interest and for whom it makes arrangements’ (Kant 2007a: 69). This essay, published in the same year as Kant’s popular Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, predates the beginnings of Kant’s lectures on anthropology by some eight years. However, it has much in common, in style and approach, with his much later (1798) Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View as well as with the Lectures on Anthropology which we know from student notes, and it has been described as part of Kant’s ‘thinking about the anthropological basis of psychopathology’.2 The explanation for the various types of malady in the ‘Essay on the Maladies of the Head’ is based on and presumes the same division of the mental faculties or mental capacities (Gemütsfahigkeiten) later elaborated in the critical philosophy (sensibility, understanding and reason), taking these faculties as objects of knowledge (rather than, as in the Critique of Pure Reason, part of the account of the conditions of possibility of there being objects of knowledge for us). Broaching the classification of the maladies, Kant first divides them into two sorts: maladies of impotence (Ohnmacht), also known as ‘imbecility’ (Blödsinnigkeit), and maladies of ‘perversion’ (Verkehrtheit) (2007a: 69). In the Cambridge edition of Kant’s collected works Holly Wilson’s translation of the ‘Essay on the Maladies of the Head’ renders Verkehrtheit as ‘reversal’. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s Deutsches Wörterbuch glosses Verkehrtheit as ‘falsche richtung des sinnes’ and cites Heine’s ‘die verkehrtheit (perversitas) des menschlichen herzens’. However, the primary reference for the word in the Grimm brothers’ dictionary is, despite its relative obscurity, Kant’s essay itself.3 Introducing his French translation of the essay Jean-Pierre Lefebvre (1979: 212) points out that Kant’s vocabulary in it is neither medical nor literary; it is peculiarly his own (see David-Ménard 1990: 114). What, we may then ask, is the peculiarly Kantian meaning of the term in the phrase Krankenheiten der Verkehrtheit? If we count Kant’s essay, very broadly, among his anthropological works, what is its specifically anthropological meaning? Anticipating an answer to this question, ‘perversion’ is perhaps the better translation, as it captures both ‘wrongness’ (in the sense of falsity) and the idea of something being pushed in the wrong direction.4 Although Kant uses the terms ‘head’ (Kopf) and ‘mind’ (Gemüt) frequently, it is his official position that maladies of impotence and maladies of perversion are both afflictions of the brain (Gehirn). Of the former Kant says only that they are incurable and that they do not allow the afflicted to leave the state of childhood, leading us to conjecture that he refers to congenital problems. In Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View he calls these maladies ‘Gemütsschwächen’, mental weaknesses, and enumerates a variety of them (stupidity, silliness, being a simpleton) but only ‘complete mental deficiency’ or idiocy (Blödsinnigkeit again) seems to be really serious. Mental weaknesses are contrasted with Gemütskrankenheiten, mental illnesses, and only those suffering with the latter belong in the ‘madhouse’ (Kant 2007c: 309). In the earlier essay, although maladies of perversion are varieties of the ‘disturbed mind’ (gestörten Gemüts) they are similarly organic problems, ‘wild disorders of the disturbed brain [wilde Unordnungen des gestörten Gehirns]’, (Kant 2007a: 70) but, as we shall see, they are disorders the development of which it is possible to study. Kant’s anthropological interest in the maladies of perversion is in their relation to the normal functioning of the faculties, and indeed to their perverse aping of this normal function (a clue to the specific, anthropological meaning of Verkehrtheit). But for those afflicted with the maladies of impotence, there is no ‘normal’ function.5 According to Kant, the maladies of perversion can be brought under as many ‘main genera’ (Hauptgattungen) as there are mental capacities (Gemütsfahigkeiten) that are afflicted by it:

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first, the perversion [die Verkehrtheit] of the concepts of experience in derangement [Verrückung], second, the power of judgment brought into disorder by this experience in dementia [Wahnsinn], third, reason that has become perverse with respect to more universal judgments in insanity [die in Ansehung allgemeinerer Urteile verkehrt gewordene Vernunft, in dem Wahnwitze]. (Kant 2007a: 70) The first, derangement, is explained in terms of hallucination (indeed Tissot translated Verrücking into French as ‘hallucination’ in 18636); it occurs when chimeras of the brain are taken for true perceptions (Kant 2007a: 71). In explaining this, Kant distinguishes between the ordinary or common and the extreme versions of this phenomenon. The former will be familiar to us all. In the twilight state between sleeping and waking, or in daydreaming and (as we would now say) fantasy, it is commonplace for us to create imaginative representations of things not present and also to supplement what we do perceive with imaginative additions: The soul of every human being is occupied even in the healthiest state with painting all kinds of images of things that are not present, or with completing some imperfect resemblance in the representation of present things through one or another chimerical trait which the creative poetic capacity [schöpferische Dichtungsfahigkeit] draws into the sensation. (Kant 2007a: 70) A person who can control this may be a fantast [Phantast] but they are not disturbed, as the illusion may easily be dispelled. Except when we are asleep and access to outer perception is closed off, the lively, sensible impressions of outer perception easily trump these fragile chimeras. But, Kant conjectures, let us suppose that certain chimeras, no matter from which cause, had damaged, as it were, one or other organ of the brain such that the impression on that organ had become just as deep and at the same time just as correct as a sensation could make it, then, given good sound reason, this phantom [Hirnsgespenst] would nevertheless have to be taken for an actual experience even in being awake. (2007a: 70–71) Kant also classes the disturbance of the faculty of recollection as derangement. In both cases, when the perverse sensations [verkehrte Empfindung] are accepted as true any judgements about them can be quite correct, in the sense that there is no disturbance of judgement. In conformity with the remarks on pure general logic in the Critique of Pure Reason, this seems to mean that the form of judgement and thus rational inference can be correct (or valid) without regard to the truth content of the propositions but also the intuitions here involved. In contrast, a disturbance of the understanding itself ‘consists in judging in a completely perverse manner [ganz verkehrt urteilt] from otherwise correct experience; and from this malady the first degree is dementia [Wahnsinn], which acts contrary to the common rules of the understanding in the immediate judgments from experience’ (Kant 2007a: 73–74). Kant writes that the demented person sees and remembers correctly but interprets the behaviour of other human beings wrongly; indeed, he says specifically, describing what might now be called ‘paranoia’, that the demented person interprets the behaviour of others as referring to themselves. There are less serious cases. Amorous passion is an amusing kind of dementia (amusing for the onlookers, one presumes) in 222

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which the lover flatters or tortures themselves with ‘many strange interpretations’; an arrogant person similarly misinterprets the scornful stares of others as admiring gazes (Kant 2007a: 74). Dementia, then, is a disorder of judgement that gives rise to perverse interpretations of human relations. The third kind of disturbance similarly appears to be a kind of misuse of a faculty: ‘reason brought into disorder, insofar as it errs in a nonsensical manner in imagined more subtle judgments concerning universal concepts [die in Unordnung gebrachte Vernunft, in so ferne sie sich in eingebildeten feineren Urteielen über allgemeine Begriffe]’. These ‘excessively subtle insights [überfeine Einsichten]’ can include conjectures as to the length of the ocean and the interpretation of prophesies ‘or who knows what hotchpotch of imprudent brain teasing’. This is Wahnwitz—insanity or deluded or manic wit. When the afflicted person is also beyond making judgements of experience they are crazy (aberwitzig). But even where there are correct judgments of experience, these may be overwhelmed and intoxicated by the ‘novelty and number of consequences’ presented to a person by his wit; ‘slow reason is no longer able to accompany the excited wit’ (Kant 2007a: 74). What Kant means by ‘wit’ and how we are to understand its relation to reason is as yet unclear—we will return to it below. But what is important in the discussion in the meanwhile is that dementia (perverted understanding) and insanity (perverted reason) are disturbances of the ‘higher power of cognition’, and in the end what they have in common is more salient than their difference. By the end of the essay, the main classificatory division is between derangement on the one hand, and dementia and insanity on the other—the difference between those who ‘infer correctly from false [falschen] representations’ and ‘those who infer wrongly [auf eine verkehrte Art schießen] from correct representations’ (2007a: 75–76).7 In ‘Maladies’ Kant calls the deranged person a ‘dreamer in waking’ (Kant 2007a: 71). But in the slightly later (1766) Dreams of a Spirit-Seer Elucidated by Dreams of Metaphysics he distinguishes between the waking dreamer and the spirit-seer (Geisterseher). The former is like the daydreamer of ‘Maladies’; the latter is different not just in degree but also in kind. While waking dreamers represent their chimeras as being ‘in themselves’, not outside, the spirit-seer, even when awake, will ‘refer certain objects to external positions among the other things which they really perceive around them’ (Kant 2002: 330–1). This gives us a definite criterion for distinguishing derangement (a particular form of madness, evident in Swedenborg’s claims that he actually sees spirits in the spatio-temporal world, in human form) (2002: 330) from the ordinary imaginings of the daydreamer (who knows that the focus imaginarius of their imaginings is located within them) (2002: 333). But with the perversions of understanding and reason the line between the pathological and the everyday variants of the disturbance is much harder to draw, as no clear criterion suggests itself. In ‘Maladies’ the basic characterisation of the perversions of the higher faculties do not sound particularly ‘mad’. In particular, the description of perverted reason—which ‘errs in a nonsensical manner in imagined more subtle judgments concerning universal concepts’, leading to ‘excessively subtle insights’—sounds very much like the excesses of the kind of ‘school philosophy’ that Kant was wont to criticise at this point in his career. By the time of Dreams of a Spirit-Seer Kant asserts an explicit distinction between madness and philosophical excess or error, the latter the product of the ‘dreamer of reason’. Kant repeats a dictum he attributes to Aristotle: ‘When we are awake we share a common world, but when we dream each has a world of his own’.8 He suggests that this also be reversed such that we can say that ‘if different people have each of them their own world, then we may suppose that they are dreaming’. The philosophies of Wolff and Crusius, he says, conjure up such idiosyncratic worlds and when we think of them we should be ‘patient with their contradictory visions, until these gentlemen have finished 223

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dreaming their dreams’ (Kant 2002: 329). But he does not want to suggest that Wolff and Crusius are ill. Kant, recall, speaks in the ‘Essay on the Maladies of the Head’ of disturbances ‘in which official care provision takes an interest and for whom it makes arrangements’—that is, of real illness—whereas the dreamers of reason appear in a diagnosis of philosophical error. Thus the ‘Essay on the Maladies of the Head’ and Dreams of a Spirit-Seer presume a distinction between the everyday psychopathologies of understanding and reason (including philosophical excess) and their pathological expression, but there is no criterion with which to distinguish them.

3 Madness and metaphysics Although Dreams distinguishes between Swedenborg’s hallucinatory visions and Wolff’s and Crusius’ philosophies, the mere fact that Kant compares occultism and metaphysics suggests some relationship or similarity between them. The apparent contradiction between the inprinciple difference and the de facto similarity between occultism and metaphysics is perhaps explained by the fact that the comparison cuts across what Kant had earlier identified as different forms of madness. When metaphysics is compared with occultic derangement they are demonstrably different, because derangement involves a fundamental disturbance of sensibility as the ground for all judgements, whereas metaphysics does not. But when metaphysics—more particularly the metaphysics that leads to philosophical error or excess—is compared with perverse understanding and reason they are, rather, more similar than not. Thus will the comparison with Swedenborg’s visions ultimately serve a useful purpose for Kant, allowing for the distinction between dreams of sense and dreams of reason, but the entanglement of perverse reason and philosophical excess is more fundamental. Even so, the relation between occultism and metaphysics and the need to justify their difference is of the highest importance for Kant’s philosophy. In La folie dans la raison pure, Monique David-Ménard argues convincingly for the importance of Kant’s ambiguous encounter with Swedenborg in the identification of the problematic of the Critique of Pure Reason, and its proposed solution.9 The encounter is ambiguous because, while Dreams ostensibly distinguishes between metaphysics and occultism—the former ‘elucidating’ the latter—it subverts its own argument and leaves the reader (and the author) unable to maintain the distinction. The first part of the book develops a negative metaphysics of the spirit world, affirming the possibility of the existence of spirits and the community of the human soul with the spirit world, but denying that when ‘everything is in good order’ any consciousness (what he would later call ‘knowledge’) of the spirit world is possible (Kant 2002: 320). Although, as ensouled beings we are part of that spirit world, the heterogeneity of the representations of the spirit world and those of the material, human world prevent the former being known in the latter. However, the ‘spirit-influence’ on persons whose organs are sensitive in the highest degree to ‘intensifying the images of the imagination’ (Kant 2002: 327) would be ‘transformed into a phantom of sensible things’, that is, represented as an external object. In the following chapter, however, Kant proposes a speculative physiological explanation for derangement, and thus for the claims of the ‘dreamers of sense’, including ‘those who from time to time have dealings with spirits’ (2002: 329). This relies on the assumption of Descartes’ idea that the representations of the imagination are accompanied by movements in the ‘nerve-tissue’ or ‘nerve-spirit’, or vibrations of the ‘subtle element’ secreted by these (Kant 2002: 332–33). These are similar to the movements made by sensible impressions, of which the imaginary representations are the copy. A disturbance in the natural balance of the brain could cause ‘the lines indicating the direction of the motions’ to get crossed, in turn causing the focus imaginarius 224

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of the imaginary representation, usually internal, to be located outside of the subject, presenting the imaginary representation to the subject as an object of external sense (Kant 2002: 333–34). This explanation has the embarrassing result that it renders superfluous the ‘deep speculations of the previous chapter’ (the metaphysical explanation), as every reader will be more ready to accept an explanation grounded on the material with which experience furnishes us, ‘rather than to lose oneself in the dizzy concepts of a reason which is half-engaged in creating fictions and half-engaged in drawing inferences’ (Kant 2002: 335). In fact, Kant again affirms the negative aspect of the metaphysical theory of spirit-beings, which establishes the limits of our understanding. It is granted to us to know only nature and the laws governing it; we may suppose the existence of spirit-natures, but can say no more about it one way or another (Kant 2002: 339). But in the second part of Dreams, Kant then examines some of Swedenborg’s claims, and in justifying his affording philosophical attention to the visionary’s ‘fairy-tales’ re-iterates the criticism of the positive metaphysical speculation: [S]ince the philosophy, with which we have prefaced this work, was no less a fairystory from the cloud-cuckoo-land of metaphysics, I can see nothing improper about having them make their appearance on the stage together. And, anyway, why should it be more respectable to allow oneself to be misled by credulous trust in the sophistries of reason than to allow oneself to be deceived by an incautious belief in delusory stories? (2002: 343) If Swedenborg’s testimony concerning his dealings with the spirit world ‘bears such an uncommon likeness to the philosophical figment of my imagination’ the point is to demonstrate the preposterous nature of the latter, not the reasonableness of the former (Kant 2002: 346). Kant nevertheless distinguishes, even in Swedenborg, between the deception of the senses and the deceptions of reason: The deception of reason could to a large extent be prevented by subjecting the powers of the mind to control by the will, and by exercising rather more restraint over an idle inquisitiveness. The deception of the senses, on the other hand, concerns the ultimate foundation of all our judgements, and if that foundation were defective, there is little that the rules of logic could do to remedy the situation! In the case of the author we are discussing, I accordingly separate sensory delusion [Wahnsinn] from the delusions of his reason [Wahnwitz].10 I shall ignore the misguided sophistries [was er auf eine verkehrte Weise klügelt] which result from his going beyond his visions, just as, in other connections, one often has to separate a philosopher’s observations from his sophistries [was er vernünftelt]. (2002: 347) As David-Ménard notes, Dreams thus simultaneously aligns dreams of reason/metaphysics with Swedenborg’s occult visions/madness (because the one—although which one is in the end not clear—‘elucidates’ the other) and distinguishes and separates them (see David-Ménard 1990: 86–87). For David-Ménard, the ambiguity of this relation, unresolved in Dreams, determines for Kant the central task of the Critique of Pure Reason—to distinguish, once and for all, true metaphysics from illusion/delusion. The troubling resemblance between Swedenborg’s visions and the dreams of metaphysics remains, haunting the text of 1781, as the vocabulary once used to describe the former (particularly ‘illusion’) now characterises the latter. But the immense, 225

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sophisticated philosophical apparatus of the Critique of Pure Reason (and particularly, for DavidMénard, the determination of the limits of reason, the critical concept of the object in general and the distinction between dialectical illusion and mere folly) is testament to the recognition of the problem and an attempt to ward off the threat. But the problem of the relationship between metaphysics and perverse reason and understanding does not, despite appearances, have its own ‘critique of pure reason’. As we have said, the ‘Essay on the Maladies of the Head’ and Dreams of a Spirit-Seer presume a distinction between the everyday psychopathologies of understanding and reason, including philosophical excess, and their pathological expression, but (unlike with derangement of the senses) there is no criterion by which to distinguish them as forms of thinking.11 Both are perverse in the same ways, and as Kant himself points out, there is a point of indifference between them. Attention to examples, he claims, shows that ‘in the beginning, when the germ of the malady develops unnoticed, an ambiguous or suggestive perversion or failure is felt [eine zweideutige Verkehrtheit gespüret wird] which does not yet give suspicion of a disturbance of the mind’ before the malady breaks out (2007a: 76).12 His examples of these ‘ambiguous perversions’ are amorous whims and melancholic brooding, the forerunners of Wahnsinn, dementia, or faulty understanding; but the point must also hold with reason gone awry. These phenomena blur the distinction between madness on the one hand and the psychopathologies of everyday life on the other; or, at the very least, they suggest a continuum. With reason, in particular, its various degrees of perversion seem to shade into one another. In his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, Kant says that the mental derangement of the perversion [Verkehrtheit] of judgment and reason—treating these as effectively the same—is explained as ‘an arbitrary [or wilful or unwilled] course13 in the patient’s thoughts which has its own (subjective) rule, but which runs contrary to the (objective) rule that is in agreement with laws of experience’ (Kant 2007c: 309). This madness sounds very much like reason without the bounds of critique; that is, the dialectical use of reason become rational psychology, rational cosmology, and so on. Perverted reason runs away with itself; earlier Kant calls it rationalising [Vernünftelei], ‘a use of reason that misses its end’ [ein den Endzweck vorbeigehender Gebrauch der Vernunft], or ‘raving with reason’ [mit Vernunft rasen], which means ‘to proceed according to principles in the form of one’s thoughts, but in the matter or end [Zwecke] to use means that are directly contrary to it’ (2007c: 307). Perhaps madness is an extreme version of ‘rationalising’, but we are given no reason to think of it as different in kind as a process of thinking to the mistakes or excesses of its everyday counterpart or to unfettered speculative philosophising. Both mad reason and ‘ambiguous perversions’ are implicitly opposed to or contrasted with correct judgement and the right use of reason, but both are, clearly, manifestations of the powers of the faculties themselves. What, then, is ‘perversion’, exactly? What is it that perverts reason? At the end of the ‘Essay on the Maladies of the Head’ Kant claims that the origin of the disturbances of the mind is likely in the body, not the mind itself; that is, here (and elsewhere) Kant attributes mental illness to non-mental causes. Claiming that he had only wanted to lay out the appearance of the maladies in the mind (Gemüt) ‘without wanting to scout out their roots’, he nevertheless believes these roots to be bodily, and that the maladies of the head may well have their main seat ‘more in the digestive parts than in the brain’ as various physicians have claimed (Kant 2007a: 76). In a short, later essay from 1786, ‘On the Philosophers’ Medicine of the Body’ Kant argues for the philosopher’s role in prescribing a mental regimen to assist the afflicted body but leaves it to the physician to help the ailing mind by caring for the body. Only the physician is qualified to treat the ‘disordered mind’ [animo aegrotanti] or the ‘mad’ [phreneticos] because madness is often innate or hereditary or 226

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else its cause ‘must be supposed to inhere in the vital organs rather than the inner recesses of the mind’ (2007a: 186). According to this aetiology, mental disturbances and the kinds of thinking that characterise them have their origin and explanation outside the affected faculties themselves. But this does not square with the description of the nature of the maladies of perversion, which characterise them in terms of the perverse usage of the peculiar and proper functions of the faculties concerned. Everything in the details of Kant’s account suggests that perverse understanding and reason are not brain malfunctions but the over-exuberant workings of the faculties untethered from the limitations of critical judgement—the over-exuberance of thinking untethered from the limitations of critical judgement.14

4 Freud: ‘faulty reasoning’ and wit What are the consequences of this for philosophical thinking? One passage in ‘Maladies’ suggests that we might attempt to answer this question via an examination of a related problem in Freud. As Kant himself indicates, with the disturbances of the higher faculty of cognition (perversions of understanding and reason) the point of indifference between pathology and normality (or between pathology and the psychopathology of everyday life) lies in those first indications of trouble, the suggestive failures or ambiguous perversions of understanding and reason that are the harbingers of illness. Although we do not find the same words, we do perhaps find the same phenomenon in Freud’s works on faulty reasoning or faulty function: The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901) and Jokes [Der Witz] and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905). In the former, a variety of faulty operations are identified, their kinship indicated linguistically in Freud’s German (but regrettably lost in Strachey’s English translation, as he acknowledges): vergessen (forgetting); das Versprechen (slips of the tongue); verlesen and verschreiben (misreadings and slips of the pen); das Vergreifen (bungled action); das Versagen (failure)15; verzerren (distortion, deformation); verdrehen (twisting); verlegen (mislaying). Freud explains that he uses the ‘ver-‘ prefix in its capacity to add a sense of ‘wrong’ or ‘miss’ to a verb (Freud 1999b: 239). All these phenomena fall under the heading of the Fehlleistung—the ‘faulty function’, malfunction, or ‘parapraxis’ as Strachey translates it. In the course of his analysis of these failures Freud notes that many examples of misspeaking ‘could pass just as well for a capital joke’—it is simply a question of whether the words are spoken with a conscious or an unconscious intention. When Freud then turns to the examination of the formal techniques of joking and jokes, he finds the same psychical processes—principally condensation and displacement—in the joke-work (die Witzarbeit) that he had previously identified in the dream-work (die Traumarbeit). In this later book on jokes or wit, the idea of a fault in reasoning or a fault in thinking (Denkfehler) comes to the fore and the processes of condensation and displacement seem at first to be examples of faulty reason. But to the extent that ‘faulty reasoning’ or ‘faulty thinking’ is a specific, knowing technique of the joke-work it is not just any kind of mistake or unintentional error. For example: A gentleman entered a pastry-cook’s shop and ordered a cake; but he soon brought it back and asked for a glass of liqueur instead. He drank it and began to leave without having paid. The proprietor detained him. ‘What do you want?’ asked the customer.—‘You’ve not paid for the liqueur’.—‘But I gave you the cake in exchange for it’.—‘You didn’t pay for that either’.—‘But I hadn’t eaten it’. (Freud 1999c: 60) 227

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Freud often contrasts faulty reasoning with the power of criticism [Macht der Kritik] or critical reason [der kritischen Vernunft] (for example, Freud 1905: 126), and it is hard to believe that this is not a nod to Kant.16 According to Freud, the development of critical reason, which is the development of a certain kind of mental activity in response to the demands of reality, comes at the expense of the pleasure to be had from the mere activity of our mental apparatus, untrammelled by needs (Freud 1999c: 179). Jokes—specifically play with words and ‘nonsense’—are the regaining of this pleasure (Freud 1999c: 236) and indeed fight against the forces of reason, critical judgement and suppression (Freud 1999c: 137). The apparent ‘meaning’ of a joke is an attempt to bribe [besticht] the powers of criticism and confuse [verwirrt] them (Freud 1999c: 132) so that the old pleasures may be enjoyed once again. At one level this pits unreason and nonsense against reason and sense, faulty reason against right reason and criticism. But things are more complicated. Freud’s book on jokes suggests that the psychical processes of faulty reasoning are the product of a particular mental faculty—wit (der Witz, the faculty of joking). Given that only some people seem gifted with the ability to make good jokes, and that these people are said to have wit, Freud suggests that ‘“Wit” appears in this connection as a special capacity—rather in the class of the old “mental faculties” [Seelenvermögen]’ (Freud 1999c: 140). Here wit is not opposed to reason and faulty reason is not the result of a deficit. Wit is an accomplishment, a capacity, an ability; not a lack or a failure. For Freud, the joke-work (Witzarbeit) in general comprises a number of psychical processes corralled in the service of the production of pleasure. A more specific characterisation of the psychical process involved in the production of ‘ready repartees’ (schlagfertigen Witzen, quick witticisms) claims that here new and unexpected unities [Einheiten] are set up, relations of ideas to one another, definitions made mutually or by reference to a common third element. I should like to name this process “unification” [Unifizierung]. It is clearly analogous to condensation [Verdichtung] by compression into the same words. (Freud 1999c: 66–67) Later ‘unification’ is defined as ‘no more than repetition in the sphere of thought-connections [Gedankenzusammenhanges] instead of in that of subject-matter [anstatt des Materials]’ (Freud 1999c: 124). The results of condensation and displacement more generally, especially in the production of dreams, can only, for ‘normal thought that is capable of being conscious’ (normalen bewußtseinsfähigen Denken), ‘give an impression of faulty reasoning’—the impression that the result is a Denkfehler (Freud 1999c: 164). But this is only the impression of conscious thought already subject to the demand of critical reason. In jokes we give free play to ‘modes of thought’ (Denkweisen) (Freud 1999c: 203) that are usual or normal (üblich) in the unconscious and moreover we take pleasure from them. Jokes and other comic and humorous productions bears witness to ‘modes of working of our mental apparatus’ which represent ‘methods of regaining from mental activity a pleasure which has in fact been lost through the development of that activity’ (Freud 1999c: 236), that is, through the development of critical reason or critical judgement (Freud 1999c: 137). If, as Freud says, many examples of misspeaking ‘could pass just as well for a capital joke’ it must be the case that the faculty responsible for jokes is also responsible for the various faulty functions analysed in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. And although there is nothing strictlyspeaking ‘pathological’ in these slip-ups and mistakes, Freud notes that their subjective determinants are often not far removed from those of neurotic illness (Freud 1999b: 142). Thus, the important point in this discussion is that der Witz as a mental faculty is not restricted to 228

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joking and although it is distinguished from judgement it is not its pathological counterpart except from the limited perspective of critical reason.17 Wit is not in itself a faulty function or faulty faculty; indeed, it is a peculiar—and peculiarly creative—facility with ideas. The ability to make connections between ideas, construct trains of thought that move swiftly from one thing to another on the basis of the smallest connection, to assemble parts from these trains of thought or to make multiple connections to one idea or image or memory or sensory perception is perhaps most evident in the dream-work. These processes, according to Freud, usually happen below the level of consciousness but they may be unravelled (at least in part) and laid out for conscious consideration in the interpretation of dreams. In The Interpretation of Dreams, in a footnote to the analysis of a particularly clever linguistic condensation in one of his own dreams, Freud notes that ‘this same kind of analysis and synthesis of syllables—a syllabic chemistry, in fact—plays a part in a great number of jokes’ (Freud 1999a: 297). Indeed, so sophisticated is this syllabic chemistry, so clever are the connections drawn between ideas, that this seems to speak against the plausibility of Freud’s theory: The first reader and critic of this book [The Interpretation of Dreams]—and his successors are likely to follow his example—protested that ‘the dreamer seems to be too ingenious and amusing [zu witzig]’. This is quite true so long as it refers only to the dreamer; it would only be an objection if it were extended to the dream-interpreter. In waking reality I have little claim to be regarded as a wit [kann ich wenig Anspruch auf das Prädikat ‘witzig’ erheben]. If my dreams seem amusing [witzig], that is not on my account, but on account of the peculiar psychological conditions under which dreams are constructed; and the fact is intimately connected with the theory of jokes [Witzigen] and the comic. Dreams become ingenious and amusing [witzig] because the direct and easiest path to the expression of their thoughts is barred: they are forced into being so. (Freud 1999a: 297–98)18 Not only is wit not a lesser form of thought; it is in some senses superior to the limited form of critical judgement because it outwits it. Wit is cleverer than critical judgement. In opposing wit to judgement Freud continues, but in a peculiar way, a well-established philosophical tradition that includes Kant. The most common characteristic that philosophers (and others) have tended to assign to wit (before this word in English signalled mainly ‘facility in making amusing ripostes’ (Corngold 1987: 463–64) is the ability to see the similarity in apparently dissimilar things and to move swiftly from one thought to another. Hobbes, in the chapter of Leviathan entitled ‘Of Man’, begins his discussion of intellectual virtues with natural wit: ‘which is gotten by Use onely, and Experience; without Method, Culture or Instruction. This NATURALL WITTE, consisteth principally in two things; Celerity of Imagining, (that is, swift succession of one thought to another;) and steddy direction to some approved end’. He opposes this to that ‘fault of the mind, which is commonly called DULNESSE, Stupidity’ and other things signifying slowness. But he distinguishes the virtue of having a good wit from good judgement: And whereas in this succession of mens thoughts, there is nothing to observe in the things they think on, but either in what they be like one another, or in what they be unlike, or what they serve for, or how they serve to such a purpose; Those that observe their similitudes, in case they be such as are but rarely observed by others, are sayd to have a Good Wit; by which in this occasion, is meant a Good Fancy. But they that observe their differences, and dissimilitudes; which is called Distinguishing, and Discerning, and 229

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Judging between thing and thing; in case, such discerning be not easie, are said to have a good Judgement. (Hobbes 1968: 134–35) Although Hobbes distinguishes, rather than opposes, wit (or Fancy) and judgement, the latter is privileged as it is a virtue on its own without any help from wit, whereas wit alone is not a virtue. Judgement is required to direct the intellectual virtue of wit, to apply thoughts to their end and make some use of them: ‘But without Steddinesse, and Direction to some End, a great Fancy is one kind of Madnesse’ (1968: 136).19 In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding Locke similarly distinguishes wit and judgement, associating wit with fancy and judgement with reason, which explains, he says, a common observation: That Men who have a great deal of Wit, and prompt Memories, have not always the clearest Judgment, or deepest Reason. For Wit lying most in the assemblage of Ideas, and putting those together with quickness and variety, wherein can be found any resemblance or congruity, thereby to make up pleasant Pictures, and agreeable Visions in the Fancy; Judgment, on the contrary, lies quite on the other side, in separating carefully, one from another, Ideas, wherein can be found the least difference, thereby to avoid being misled by Similitude, and by affinity to take one thing for another. (Locke 1975: 156) For Locke, too, the discussion of wit and judgement moves easily into reflections on madness, in passages that almost seem to be the original of Kant’s ‘Essay on the Maladies of the Head’: How far idiots are concerned in want or weakness of any, or all of the foregoing Faculties, an exact observation of their several ways of faltering, would no doubt discover … In fine, the defect in Naturals seems to proceed from want of quickness, activity, and motion, in the intellectual Faculties, whereby they are deprived of Reason: Whereas mad Men, on the other side, seem to suffer by the other Extreme. For they do not appear to me to have lost the Faculty of Reasoning, but having joined together some Ideas very wrongly, they mistake them for Truths; and they err as Men do, that argue right from wrong Principles. For by the violence of their Imaginations, having taken their Fancies for Realities, they make right deductions from them … But there are degrees of Madness, as of Folly; the disorderly jumbling Ideas together, is in some more, and some less. In short, herein seems to lie the difference between Idiots and mad Men, That mad Men put wrong Ideas together, and so make wrong Propositions, but argue and reason right from them: But Idiots make very few or no Propositions, and reason scarce at all. (1975: 160–61) Madness, as opposed to idiocy, is not unreason but reason gone awry, or the misfiring of the capacity of finding resemblances between ideas—too much wit, in want of judgement.20 When Kant then comes to treat of the same subject (in Observations on the Beautiful and the Sublime, ‘Essay on the Maladies of the Head’, Lectures on Pedagogy, Critique of Pure Reason, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View and Lectures on Anthropology) he is thus not original. His comments on wit across these works, across decades, are, as one would expect, especially from the lecture format, not always consistent. But several central points are repeated: wit is a 230

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natural talent21; wit is to be contrasted with the power of judgement; wit is free and playful and delights, whereas judgement is laborious and serious22; unrestrained wit outplays reason or becomes idle rationalising.23 Kant also characterises wit in the same terms as Hobbes and Locke, stressing its ability to connect the apparently dissimilar: Just as the faculty of discovering the particular for the Universal (the rule) is the power of judgement, so the faculty of thinking up the universal for the particular is wit (ingenium). The power of judgment is a matter of noting the differences in a manifold that is identical in part; wit is a matter of noting the identity of a manifold that is different in part.—The outstanding talent in both is noticing even the smallest similarity or dissimilarity. The faculty to do this is astuteness (acumen), and observations of this kind are called subtleties; which if they do not advance cognition, are called empty hairsplitting [Spitzfindigkeiten] or idle rationalizing.24 (Kant 2007c: 308) The section on the weaknesses and the illnesses of the mind follow immediately upon this, reiterating the idea from ‘Maladies’ that perverted reason is reason overcome by (its own) wit. Reiterating the relationship between ingenium (the conceptual origin of the idea of genius) and wit, Kant also says that wit ‘pairs (assimilates) heterogeneous representations that often, according to the law of the power of imagination (of association) lie far apart from each other. It is a peculiar faculty of assimilating, which belongs to the understanding (as the faculty of cognizing the universal, in so far as it brings objects under genera. […] To be witty (in speech or writing) cannot be learned through the mechanism of the school and its constraint’ (20007c: 325).25 Bringing all this together, what is the most important point? It is that there is an intellectual process of the connection of ideas which serves as the foundation for the power of critical judgement and its role in cognition: the thought-work.26 This lively thought process—we can call it ‘wit’ if we like—is the restless activity of thinking, anthropologically understood; that is, a de facto subjective activity that is part of the empirical existence of each human subject.27 Thinking is dependent on sensibility (or experience) for its materials: ‘Thinking is not representing things for oneself, which occurs by means of sensibility, but the processing of the materials which sensibility presents’ (Kant 2002: 101). But thinking, as the Critique of Pure Reason teaches, is relatively autonomous in relation to critical judgement. Thinking does not supply any transcendental elements for cognition but effects a first idiosyncratic association of representations for each empirical subject. What is built upon or out of these idiosyncratic associations may vary: philosophy, idle rationalising, dreaming, joking, madness. Once again, it is Freud who has best described this restless activity of thinking and what may be produced out of it. In The Interpretations of Dreams, the analysis of the ‘Dream of the Botanical Monograph’ is a particularly rich example, bearing witness to the extraordinary workings of the mind, most particularly its capacity to find and multiply connections between ideas and memories. From the four-line description of the dream, which, in the recounting at least, took the form of a short visual sequence,28 Freud unravels multiple trains of thought. These encompass memories and their related word, image and concept associations from Freud’s childhood, early adulthood, recent past and from the previous day, including his daydreams and conscious fantasies. The interpretation connects ostensibly unconnected memories via these words, images and concepts, arriving at some memories via a number of different routes. The practical terminal point of this dream-interpretation occurs with the connection between two otherwise unconnected things: an ‘indifferent’ memory from the ‘dream day’ (the day before 231

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the dream)—that morning he had seen a monograph on the genus Cyclamen in a shop window—and a significant conversation with a friend which had stirred up disturbing memories that re-asserted themselves, via an extremely circuitous route, in the dream. This connection is an achievement of the dream-work: ‘connections of this kind, when they are not present in the first instance, are woven retrospectively between the ideational content of one impression and that of the other’ (Freud 1999a: 175). Freud is prepared, he says, to find his interpretation of this and other dreams ‘attacked on the ground of its being artificial or arbitrary’ (1999a: 176), which is to say that the connections are constructed in, not uncovered by, analysis. But even if the connections are made in the consulting room or anywhere else during the course of the waking day, the point stands that the interpretation bears witness to the extraordinarily clever, quick, inventive, audacious wit-craft29 of thinking: the thought-work, specific examples of which Freud analyses as the dream-work or the joke-work. The kinds of networks of associations exemplified here are not closed series or discrete groups whose being-thought was temporally bounded and is now only accessed as something belonging to the past. The thought-work is the constant activity of the mind, ending only with death. For Freud, snapshots may emerge as dreams from out of the network of the staggeringly complicated thought-work, when one small part or parts of the thought-work is subject to particularly intense processes of condensation, especially, and transformed (again, at least in part) into images, under the specific condition of sleep. Is it far-fetched to suggest that philosophy is similarly a product of the working-over (Bearbeitung) of the thought-work? Kant did not seem to think so. In the Philippi Logic transcript (1772) he proposes himself as an example of philosophising on the basis of subjective associations and recommends his way of working to his students: ‘First one writes down all thoughts as they come, without any order. Thereafter one begins to co-ordinate and then to subordinate’.30 Thus philosophical thought emerges from the application of forms of judgement to the thought-work. Of course, thoughts do not actually come ‘without any order’. As Hobbes says: ‘When a man thinketh on anything whatsoever, His next Thought after, is not altogether so casuall as it seems to be’ (1968: 94). It is the empirical human being who thinks, not the transcendental subject, and the subjective factuality of each person’s thinking is determined (in the weak sense) by their social, cultural (including linguistic) and individual history. The thought-work supplies the preoccupations (for example, a preoccupation with Swedenborg) and the connection of ideas (for example, the similarity between metaphysics and occultism) out of or upon which, working it through, critical reason articulates a set of philosophical problems and propositions. The thought-work gives the problem, the nagging uncertainties of connections between ideas that have yet to be understood. The thought-work also supplies those specific ideationallinguistic complexes that make up one part of the material of philosophical thinking—for example, the set of juridical metaphors and concepts through which Kant can think the project of the Critique of Pure Reason. Kant’s reflections on madness brought us to this point because—despite his positing of a physiological aetiology for madness—those reflections open up the idea, perhaps contrary to his express intention, that it is proper to the workings of the faculties that they exceed their critical boundaries. Kant’s idea of a physical aetiology for mental disturbance coheres with the attempt to keep the transcendental aspects of the critical philosophy free from interference from the empirical or anthropological, which is to say the attempt to keep the transcendental free of pathological influence. But if the various aspects of the thought-work, some of which only ‘give an impression of faulty reasoning’, constitute the very liveliness of thought itself, then the influence of the pathological (in the sense of what is not purely transcendentally determined;

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the contingencies of everyday life) is not pathological (in the sense of what is faulty or wrong) when it asserts itself in reason.31 There is no philosophical thinking without the thought-work, and, in the end, it is not possible to distinguish absolutely between the thought-work and the philosophy-work.32 Sometimes the identification or isolation of aspects of the thought-work in a work will give commentators the lever with which to interpret the work—to lay it out for understanding.33 Sometimes the thought-work in a work supplies a critical lever.34 In both cases the thoughtwork of the critic/commentator plays its own role. But it would be a mistake to suppose (as Kant seemed to) that philosophy, to be objective, should seek to disengage itself from the subjective thought-work. That would be like the ‘light dove’ who could get the idea that it would fly even more freely in an airless space (Kant 1998: A5/B9). Of course, it would not fly at all.

Notes 1 ‘Sapere audere! Have courage to make use of your own understanding!’ (Kant 1996: 17) 2 By Zöller and Louden, in their Introduction to the essay (Kant 2007a: 64). Kant’s essay was first published (as ‘Versuch Über die Krankenheiten des Kopfes’) in the Königsberg Learned and Political Newspaper (Königsbergische Gelehrte und Politische Zeitungen). 3 The point is made in David-Ménard (1990: 112). The Grimm brothers’ dictionary is online: http:// woerterbuchnetz.de/cgi-bin/WBNetz/wbgui_py?sigle=DWB. 4 In Robert B. Louden’s translation of Anthropology From a Pragmatic Point of View, Verkehrtheit, in the discussion of mental illness, is ‘perversion’. 5 In a remark in the Anthropology Friedländer, Kant compares infirmity of the mind with infirmity of the body: both are ‘crippled states’. Infirmity of the mind is not a hindrance to the power of the mind but a lack, ‘when the condition for the regular use of the powers of the mind is lacking’ (Kant 2012: 113). 6 The translation is online: https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Essai_sur_les_maladies_de_l%E2%80%99esprit. In David-Ménard’s (1990) translation, it is ‘dérangement’. 7 This is also the case in the Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, where mental illness is divided into ‘perversity of judgment and reason [Verkehrtheit der Urteilskraft und der Vernunft]’ (here called Wahnwitz or Aberwitz) and waking dreaming (associated with the visionary and the enthusiast) (Kant 2007c: 309). 8 David Walford (in Kant 2002: 451, note 30) points out that the quotation in fact comes from a fragment of Heraclitus. 9 David-Ménard (1990: 89): ‘Dreams of a Spirit-Seer is the book that inaugurates if not most, then at least many of the essential themes of the critical and transcendental philosophy: the idea of critical philosophy itself, as a science of the limits of reason; the idea of the separation of the sensible and the supersensible; the new concept of modality and, in particular, the concept of that which is not impossible without therefore being possible; the negative theory of the transcendent; and, finally, the sceptical method which allows for the construction of a dialectic of pure reason’. 10 Thus, Kant uses a slightly different classificatory terminology than in ‘Maladies’. 11 With this problem we focus specifically on the perversions of understanding and reason in isolation from the delusion of the senses. We thus depart from David-Ménard’s concentration on the relationship between dreams of sense and dreams of metaphysics, whilst acknowledging that one of the points of her reading is that Kant’s own comparison between Swedenborg’s visions and the dream of metaphysics can only work if there exists a ‘kinship’ (parenté) between sensation and reason (1990: 92). 12 Translation modified. One is inclined to ask: how does he know about this feeling? But that is another matter. 13 The modern German edition has ‘ein willkürlicher Lauf’, but Kant’s manuscript says ‘ein unwillkürlicher Lauf’. The slippage is interesting. 14 As is also suggested by the reference to ‘der verkehrten Vernunft (perversa ratio, husteron proteron rationis)’ in the Critique of Pure Reason (1998: A692/B720), the example of which is the ‘misinterpretation of the […] principle of systematic unity’, failing to treat the principle merely regulatively.

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Stella Sandford 15 On the first page of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Strachey translates ‘Versagen einer psychischen Funktion’ as an instance ‘in which a psychical function … refuses to operate’ (Freud 1999b: 1). 16 See Freud (1999c: 171, 178). Freud had some acquaintance with Kant’s work, especially Observations on the Beautiful and the Sublime and the Critique of Pure Reason, and he certainly knew the outlines of his moral philosophy. See also Sandford (2017). 17 See also Freud (1999c: 170), where he claims that we could understand the deliria of the insane [die Delirien der Geisteskranken] if we did not apply the demands of conscious thought to them. 18 Strachey (In Freud 1999a: 297–98, note 1) notes that this ‘first reader’ is Fleiss. Both the dreamer and the dream interpreter are Freud. 19 From one perspective Hobbes is hardly consistent in the discussion of wit and judgement. He first defines intellectual virtue as natural wit, before then explaining natural wit as one of the intellectual virtues. He first attributes ‘steady direction to wit’, but, after the distinction between wit and judgement, attributes this only to the latter. The contradictions are perhaps the consequence of a new vocabulary in the course of being defined. ‘Natural wit’ is the generic term, its species ‘fancy’ and ‘judgement’. Acquired wit ‘is none but Reason; which is grounded on the right use of Speech; and produceth the Sciences’ (Hobbes 1968: 138). But the vocabulary of wit, fancy and judgement is not wholly consistently used. 20 In Chapter XXXIII of Book II, ‘Of the Association of Ideas’, Locke reiterates his main point about madness–that he finds it to ‘spring from the very same Root, and to depend on the very same Cause we are here speaking of’; that is, the association of ideas (1975: 395). 21 For example, Kant (2007c: 250, 308, 325; 1998: 749). 22 For example, Kant (2007b: 66; 2007c: 311, 326; 2012: 268, 382, 387–92). 23 For example, Kant (2007b: 74). 24 Translation altered. 25 And later: ‘It is pleasant, popular, and stimulating to discover similarities among dissimilar things, so wit provides material to the understanding to make its concepts more general’ (Kant 2007c: 326). 26 After wit has paired heterogenous representations the power of judgement is required ‘in order to determine the particular under the universal and in order to apply the faculty of thought toward cognition’ (Kant 2007c: 325). 27 And thus not subject to the kind of criticism directed at metaphysical concepts of ‘thought’ in Alfredo Ferrarin’s Thinking and the I: Hegel and the Critique of Kant (2019). 28 ‘Dream of the Botanical Monograph’: ‘I had written a monograph on a certain plant. The book lay before me and I was at that moment turning over a folded coloured plate. Bound up in each copy there was a dried specimen of the plant, as though it had been taken from a herbarium’ (Freud 1999a: 169). 29 In 1573, Ralphe Lever’s attempt to translate Aristotle’s philosophical terms into English led him to propose the word ‘witcraft’ for ‘the art of reasoning’: ‘seeing that Wit in oure mother toung is oft taken for reason: and crafte is the aunciente English woorde, whereby wée haue used to expresse an Arte: whiche two wordes knit together in Witcrafte, do … signifie the Arte that teacheth witte and reason.’ 30 Quoted in Förster’s introduction to Kant (1993: xxiv). Although Kant says that the thoughts come ‘without any order’, they are ordered, just not according to critical judgement. 31 To accept this, one does not also have to accept that there is no difference between relatively good and relatively poor mental health. In general, we are well able to distinguish between the psychopathology of everyday life and the pathological psychical phenomena (depression, acute anxiety, delusion, psychosis and so on) that interrupt everyday life and lead us to seek professional help. But to accept this is to deny that the processes of ‘normal’ thought are insulated and in-principle quite distinct from their delusional or psychotic counterparts. 32 See Sandford (2018). The ‘thought-work’ is perhaps another term for what Hélène Metzger calls ‘spontaneous thought’ in so far as this (contra Lévy-Bruhl) is a continuously active, creative and expansive element of human thinking: ‘This [spontaneous] thought is often smothered or repressed (if we dare to borrow an astonishingly appropriate term from Freud) by the logical criticism whose task is normally to discipline and guide it.’ (Metzger 1987: 120). 33 Although it is not presented in this way, this is arguably the case in Mensch (2013). 34 See Sandford (2013).

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References Corngold, S. (1987) Wit and Judgment in the Eighteenth Century: Lessing and Kant, MLN 102.3: 461–482. David-Ménard, M. (1990) La Folie dans la raison pure: Kant lecteur de Swedenborg, Paris: Vrin. David-Ménard, M. (2000) Kant’s “Essay on the Maladies of the Mind” and Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime, Hypatia, 15.4: 82–98. Freud, S. (1999a) The Interpretation of Dreams, in J. Strachey (ed.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vols. 4 and 5, London: Vintage. Freud, S. (1999b) The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, in J. Strachey (ed.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 6, London: Vintage. Freud, S. (1999c) Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, in J. Strachey (ed.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 8, London: Vintage. Hobbes, T. (1968) Leviathan, London: Penguin. Kant, I. (1993) Opus Postumum, (trans.) E. Förster and M. Rosen, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kant, I. (1996) An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?, in M. J. Gregor (trans.), A. W. Wood (ed.), Kant, Practical Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kant, I. (1998) Critique of Pure Reason, (trans.) P. Guyer and A. W. Wood, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kant, I. (2002) Dreams of a Spirit-Seer Elucidated by Dreams of Metaphysics, in D. Walford (trans.), D. Walford and R. Meerbote (eds.), Theoretical Philosophy 1755–1770, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kant, I. (2007a) Essay on the Maladies of the Head, in H. Wilson (trans.), G. Zöller and R. B. Louden (eds.), Anthropology, History, and Education, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kant, I. (2007b) Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, in G. Zöller and R. B. Louden (eds.), Anthropology, History, and Education, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kant, I. (2007c) Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, in R. B. Louden (trans.), G. Zöller and R. B. Louden (eds.), Anthropology, History, and Education, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kant, I. (2012) Lectures on Anthropology, (eds.) A. W. Wood and R. B. Louden, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lefebvre, J.-P. (1979) Essai sur les maladies de la tête, Revue des sciences humaines 176. Lever, R. (1573) The Arte of Reasoning, Properly called Witcraft, London: H. Bynneman. Locke, J. (1975) An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mensch, J. (2013) Kant’s Organicism: Epigenesis and the Development of Critical Philosophy, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Metzger, H. (1987) La méthode philosophique en histoire des sciences: Textes 1914–1939, Paris: Fayard. Sandford, S. (2013) Spontaneous Generation: The Fantasy of the Birth of Concepts in Kants Critique of Pure Reason, Radical Philosophy 179, May/June: 15–26. Sandford, S. (2017) Freud, Bion and Kant: Epistemology and Anthropology in The Interpretation of Dreams, International Journal of Psychoanalysis 98.1: 91–110. Sandford, S. (2018) Race and Sex in Western Philosophy: Another Answer to the Question “What Does It Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking?”, Critical Philosophy of Race 6.2: 108–197.

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17 THINKING OTHERWISE WITH IRIGARAY AND MAXIMIN Rachel Jones

1 Introduction: decolonising métissage What does it mean to think if one has been consigned to the position of Other? To think as one who has been defined against the subject, identified as object (and abject), seen as lacking in the capacities required to count as fully human, or relegated to the sub-human? This chapter will begin by exploring Luce Irigaray’s strategies for exposing the status of woman as Other and opening a passage towards the other-of-the-Other. By jamming the machinery of western metaphysical thought so as to think otherwise, Irigaray discloses the dependence of that thought on the constitutive denial of sexual difference, and generates figures for re-thinking difference in the form of relational, sexuate subjects. The subject-object/Other structure that Irigaray contests is a product of western philosophical (post-Cartesian, post-Kantian but also constitutively colonial) modernity. Yet as others have suggested, and as will be discussed in this chapter, Irigaray’s work does not sufficiently reckon with its own colonial context or with the difference that race makes, both to the subject and to the question of sexuate difference. Re-reading Irigaray with thinkers such as Frantz Fanon, Hortense Spillers and Sylvia Wynter, allows us to re-centre race in a critique of Man while paying attention to the complex ways in which gender, race and sexuate difference mutually (and often violently) inflect, transform, neutralise, or intensify one another. The chapter will further this conjunctive approach by reading Irigaray together with Guadeloupean author Daniel Maximin, who resituates Irigaray’s project of thinking as theother-of-the-Other in the mutually reinforcing contexts of colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade. Particular attention will be paid to métissage, a figure through which Maximin invokes a history of racialised, reproductive violence while simultaneously affirming a generative crossing or mixing that refuses the fetishisation of racial purity and the colonising dialectics of Same versus Other. Tracing the hybrid etymological genealogy of this term leads us back through its roots in the Latin mixtus (mixed) to its ancient Greek homonym mêtis, the kind of skilful wisdom enacted in the knowing gestures of weavers such as Penelope in Homer’s Odyssey. By reading Adriana Cavarero’s subversive re-appropriation of Penelope together with the work of Saidiya Hartman, Katherine McKittrick and Danielle Skeehan, métissage emerges at the conjunction of mêtis and métis, returning us to the fugitive labours of black enslaved women

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whose resistant mêtis of care enabled ‘those “who were never meant to survive” to sometimes do just that’ (Hartman 2016: 171, citing Audre Lorde’s poem ‘A Litany for Survival’). Approached via Maximin and this weave of amplifying voices, métissage provides a figure for a relational thinking that does not disavow the racialised violence with which modern Western philosophy, including in its white feminist forms, is inextricably entangled; that attends to the inseparability of racialisation and sexual difference; that affirms its own conditionality, its spatiotemporal contingencies, and its dependencies on difference, otherness, and multiple materialities; and that pluralises what counts as thought, as well as the image of bodies that think.

2 The Other and the other of the Other As suggested by the title of her ground-breaking work, Speculum de l’autre femme (Speculum of the Other Woman), Irigaray seeks to re-orient thinking from the side of the ‘Other’. Her work painstakingly exposes the ways in which Western metaphysics has been supported by the foreclosure of sexual difference and human beings’ beginnings in birth, which Irigaray refers to as a symbolic matricide. This double foreclosure is necessarily linked, as to be born from a m/ other is to come into the world through a distinctively sexuate body, one that can generate from within, and to take up a relation to this body as a sexuate bodily being oneself. Irigaray suggests that these dual aspects of human beings’ ontological condition have been suppressed in Western thought and culture, whose dominant forms depend on obscuring the fact that this conjoined suppression has taken place. This double foreclosure has sustained the erection of a subject presented as ‘universal’ yet secured as male via the exclusion, negation, appropriation and subordination of the feminine and the female (terms which are not so neatly separated in the French feminin, which in Irigaray’s usage holds together what the English language separates out into ‘sex’ and ‘gender’). Just as being born from a m/other is not merely a biological but an ontological and existential event (it concerns how we come to be and to appear in the world),1 the archetypal ‘maleness’ of this subject is irreducible to a merely biological matter, though it is bodily (and not merely a social construction). For Irigaray, ‘the biological’ and ‘the social’ are reifications and abstractions of that which is inseparably entwined, as the bodily is always form-giving and meaning-making while symbolic and social forms depend on the breath, gestures, flesh, and earth that allow them to materialise. Instead of a nature/culture divide, she thus proposes forms of cultivation as the basis for an ethics and politics of sexual difference. According to Irigaray, the ‘maleness’ of the supposedly universal subject results from the privileging of a particular interpretation of corporeality—an interpretation that is lived and bodily as much as it is social and symbolic—organised around the image of the One, the unified, the self-contained and self-governing, the solid, the whole, and the proper, in contrast to the multiple, open and interdependent, fluid, incomplete and improper. The morphology of the male subject is interpreted in ways that make it isomorphic with this One whose self-sameness is secured against an ‘Other’ that plays the role of desirable object, sustaining plenitude and terrifying lack, and that is thus figured as an unruly excess capable of shifting between these conflicting positions or inhabiting them all at once. Speculum exposes these multiple projections of ‘woman’ as an Other who is always, within this metaphysics, the Other of the Same. By foregrounding the inconsistent, contradictory figures against which the male subject is secured—according to which ‘woman’ is simultaneously lack and excess, passively inert and wildly unpredictable, pliable substance and uncontrollably fluid—Irigaray discloses an unincorporated remainder that moves between these figures while being irreducible to any one. To open a passage towards this unincorporated remainder as other than the Other of the Same, she thus suggests attending to 237

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‘the spaces between the figures … Spaces that organise the scene, blanks that sub-tend the scene’s structuration’ (Irigaray 1985: 137–38; my emphasis). Navigating this passage is risky and its consequences unforeseeable. It demands a ‘new poetics’ (Irigaray 1993a: 5), understood as a poesis that figures forth sexuate modes of being that allow for a distinctive feminin subject no longer defined as the Other of Man: Is comparing it to the others of the same [aux autres des mêmes] the only thing to be done? … As for the relationship to the others of the others [aux autres des autres], to the other of the other, anyone who ventures near it will be threatened with loss of self (as same), for it does not exclude the possibility of there being a reversal. (Irigaray 1985a: 335) This reversal would be a reversal of reversal (‘the Copernican Revolution has yet to have its final effects’ (1985a: 133)), given that the Other already operates as ‘the reverse, the negative of the properties of sameness’, threatening the limits of the subject by ‘overflow[ing] the unity of selfidentity’ while providing a reserve, ‘a store of in(de)finite alterity’ on which that subject can draw to erect his forms. Nonetheless, this ‘obscure reserve’ remains unintelligible to the subject’s gaze; ‘lacking in principle’, its/her otherness ‘moves without foundation’ and in its inconstancy, ‘cannot be ringed in once and for all’ (1985a: 335; trans. modified). To secure the identity of the self-asSame, difference and otherness must be continually re-contained and re-projected as Other; yet spaces open up between these ever-multiplying reflections/negations in which the Other of the Same imperceptibly becomes the other of ‘the Other’. Seeking to articulate—to speak and think as and from—these intervals2 of irreducible difference is risky because there is no secure way to hold the irreducible remainder of the other of the Other apart from the figure of excess (for example) that re-encloses her alterity as the Other of the Same (indeed, the very desire for a secure way to separate them belongs to the economy of self-contained identity that Irigaray seeks to displace). Such a project needs to avoid merely speaking of woman, and thereby re-objectifying her, given the identification of (woman as) the Other with a particular conception of the object: as feared or desired but never desiring; as mute, inert, and sensible matter rather than a material agency and sensitivity. ‘Speaking from the side of the Other’ means asking ‘what if the “object” started to speak?’ (1985a: 135); converting the constitutive muteness of her repressed alterity to give voice to an animate otherness that resists capture by subject/object, active/passive binaries. Irigaray’s ‘new poetics’ thus seeks figures with which to think an alternative process of constituting an always bodily, sexuate subject—as natal, labial, placental; fluid without being formless, distinctive without excluding otherness—in ways that are not opposed to but uncapturable by the dominant logic of the masculine One.

3 Strategies for thinking otherwise To further this project, Irigaray deploys a multiplicity of strategies, as she outlines in This Sex Which Is Not One.3 The first of these is characterised by what Elizabeth Weed calls the ‘intense intimacy’ of Irigaray’s engagement with the Western philosophical tradition—her ‘fling with the philosophers’ (Weed 2010: 22; Irigaray 1985b: 150–51). Because philosophy takes itself to ‘set forth the law for all others, inasmuch as it constitutes the discourse on discourse’, Irigaray works back through the history of philosophy ‘to interrogate the conditions under which systematicity itself is possible’ (Irigaray 1985b: 74). This interpretative practice involves a ‘radical citationality’ (Weed 1994: 83) through which Irigaray reclaims, disrupts and reanimates the 238

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archive of phallogocentrism, as exemplified in Speculum which ranges from line by line readings of particular texts, including Freud’s ‘On Femininity’ and Plato’s Allegory of the Cave; to chapters that are composed wholly of citations, made to resonate differently through their curated juxtaposition and the lens of the surrounding analysis (‘On the Index of Plato’s Works: Women’ and ‘Une Mère de Glace’, composed of extracts from Plotinus’ Enneads); to the multiple direct and indirect citations of philosophical works that are densely interwoven throughout, as in the central chapters on Descartes, Kant and Hegel. As Weed (1994: 83–84) also notes, this means that in Irigaray’s work, thinking from the side of the Other means engaging in a ‘reading’ that is also a re-writing, in a style that refuses the clear cut separation of ‘primary’ from ‘secondary’ texts, a version perhaps of the middle voice that Irigaray elsewhere borrows from ancient Greek (Irigaray 2008) to signal a mode of speaking in-between activity (of a subject) and passivity (of an object). If the object started to speak, it would perhaps do so in such a voice (suggesting that, rather than thematise the need for two sexuate subjects, we might tarry longer with the disruptive position of ‘an object that speaks’ with an agency that is inseparable from a maternal-material passibility). If the Western philosophical tradition depends on a founding repression of the corps-à-corps with the mother that allows each human being to come to be, Irigaray inhabits the texts of her philosophical forefathers with a scandalous intimacy, turning them into gestational bodies that give birth to questions, thoughts, and imagined possibilities that disrupt the ostensible universality of ‘Any Theory of the Subject’ and expose its dependence on the suppression of sexual difference. This is where the second of her strategies is crucial, for as she notes her ‘process of interpretative rereading has always been a psychoanalytic undertaking as well’, one that seeks to analyse ‘the way the unconscious works in each philosophy, and perhaps in philosophy in general’ (Irigaray 1985b: 75). It is the passage between philosophy and psychoanalysis that is generative here. Irigaray mobilises Freud’s thematisation of the role of sexuality in the formation of ‘the’ subject to disinter the repression of sexual difference and maternal dependency that is a constitutive condition of western metaphysics. At the same time, she shows how Freud’s own theorising remains ‘in part—and precisely where the difference between the sexes is concerned—caught up in metaphysical presuppositions’ (1985b: 73), which is to say that he continues to ‘define sexual difference by giving a priori value to Sameness’ (1985b: 72). Crossing these ‘master’ discourses so as to allow each to expose the constitutive conditions of the other in turn relies upon perhaps the most well-known of Irigaray’s strategies, that of subversive mimesis (1985b: 76).4 It is this approach that allows her to insert a disruptive difference into a tradition marked by its sexual indifference. Irigaray presents this subversive mimicry as ‘deliberately’ taking up the position woman is assigned within a phallogocentric economy of the Same, where as Other and object, she doubles as both reflection/projection of the male subject’s fears and desires, and as the projecting screen, the necessary but necessarily backgrounded material support for his speculative project. Rather than attempting to inhabit the speaking position of the (male) subject, assuming the feminine role ‘deliberately’ is ‘already to convert a form of subordination into an affirmation, and thus to begin to thwart it’ (1985b: 76). ‘Deliberately’ here involves at least a threefold movement. First, it means miming the feminine position while reflecting on its role as that which subtends a masculine logic, thereby making ‘“visible”, by an effect of playful repetition, what was supposed to remain invisible: the cover-up of a possible operation of the feminine in language’ (1985b: 76). Second, it means reflecting back to the (male) subject not only his own words but the structures of constitutive exclusion, negation and appropriation (of the feminine, female and maternal) on which his speaking position depends: ‘Insist also and deliberately on those blanks in discourse which recall 239

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the places of her exclusion and which, by their silent plasticity, ensure the cohesion, the articulation, the coherent expansion of established forms’ (Irigaray 1985a: 142). By drawing out the role of maternal matter in ‘nourishing’ philosophical speculation and of a feminine excess in ciphering off that which ‘resists transparency’ (Irigaray 1985b: 151), Irigaray reflects back to the subject the conditions of systematicity whose effectiveness depends on their remaining silent and unthematised. If Irigaray risks an ‘intense intimacy’ with her philosophical and psychoanalytic forefathers, she does so ‘to return the masculine to itself’ (Weed 2010: 22); her ‘excessive mimicry … unsettles the system by throwing back to it what it cannot accept about its own operations’ (Grosz 1989: 138). This return, however, is not a return of the Same: exposing a feminine supplement whose effectiveness depends on remaining mute and invisible, like the tain of the mirror, ‘jams the theoretical machinery’ of the masculine symbolic order and the imaginary that subtends it (Irigaray 1985b, 78). Thus, third, a ‘disruptive excess’ is revealed ‘on the feminine side’ (1985b: 78): ‘if women are such good mimics, it is because they are not simply resorbed in this function. They also remain elsewhere’ (1985b: 76). An ‘elsewhere’ that remains to be figured otherwise, and that Irigaray links to both an anomalous (from the perspective of the subject) feminine auto-affection and the maternal mat(t)er that is appropriated to sustain a masculine logic of the ‘One’ and the ‘Same’ even as her own generativity is denied (1985b: 76–77; see also 1985b: 151–58). Thinking from the side of the Other, in ways that open a passage to the other of the Other, necessitates the generation of figures for an object that speaks and a sexuate subject that is not One. Thus, the figures of the ‘two lips’ and the ‘placental economy’ refuse the supposedly universal condition whereby the ‘the subject’ is constituted against its ‘Other’ along with the oppositions of culture/nature, mind/body, form/matter. Instead, these figures articulate a fluid generativity in which self and other take shape together, delimiting each another’s distinctive forms in a contiguous proximity sustained by the space-time shared between them in always corporeal rhythms. The doubled lips move in relation to each other without becoming one, allowing the multiplicity of feminine desire to articulate a complex patterning of relations that have no need to mirror the phallic form, by whose rigidity they cannot be contained (Irigaray 1985b: 209). Sexual difference is figured not as difference from the male form but as sexuate specificity that emerges through a play of relations in an ‘auto’-affection that produces the ‘self ’ as a temporalised pattern of differencing. Maternal-materiality is here far from a passive container or unformed matter; instead, it materialises spatio-temporal forms through its generative rhythms, as figured in the placental economy that Irigaray articulates with embryologist Hélène Rouch (Irigaray 1993b: 37–45). Refusing both the image of the maternal as undifferentiated fusion and the logic of the ‘cut’ that produces the One via separation from its (m/)Other, Irigaray re-centres the gestational body as a tissue of relations that allows otherness to be harboured within, without being expelled or absorbed, allowing for (at least) two who are inseparable without being merged, singular without being separable. Such figures for thinking otherwise recur across Irigaray’s writings, as in the ‘irreversible volume’ that remains inassimilable to the subject’s speculations (1985a) and the ‘sensible transcendental’ that refigures the forms that condition human existence as emerging from the fluid movements of a generative (not reproductive) materiality. They enable her to displace the hylomorphism of the Western tradition (in which active male form is imposed on supposedly inert, feminine matter) and block the reduction of both woman and the earth to the ‘elsewhere from which the “subject” continues to draw his reserves’ (Irigaray 1985a: 227). Articulating an elsewhere to that elsewhere depends on translating the relational-corporeal forms of sexuate difference into figures that amplify the possibilities for its cultivation. 240

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4 The speculum was always already racialised In Irigaray’s work, a supposedly a-perspectival subject is displaced by a relational, prepositional thinking, which seeks to think otherwise by thinking with, against, between, beneath, around, outside and through the dense mesh of phallogocentrism. Irigaray presents this mesh as a colonising trap insofar as feminine-female-maternal bodies, and the elemental materialities with which they are elided, are appropriated to sustain ‘the self-same of western man’ who simultaneously denies his dependence on any m/other. Her analysis of ‘the formal problematic of thinking difference without relapsing into another version of the same’ (Chanter 2010: 220) exposes the deep logic of colonial appropriation even as—as others have noted—her texts seem troublingly silent about their own colonial context and, in particular, about the production of ‘race’ as a technology for appropriating, managing and negating otherness.5 Borrowing from Irigaray, we might suggest that one of the ‘blanks’ that structures her own discourse is the difference that is made to sexual difference by a racialised history that implicitly informs her texts yet remains largely absent from her analysis. As a way of staging this silence and acknowledging the constitutive yet excluded others of Irigaray’s project (Chanter 2010), we might recall the twelve or more enslaved black women sent to physician James Sims in Montgomery, Alabama, in the 1840s (Kuppers 2007). These women were the subjects of the extensive medical experiments that led to Sims’ development of the modern speculum. Only three are named in Sims’ autobiography—Betsey, Lucy and Anarcha—but their bodies are the material condition for one of the most important figures in Irigaray’s work. To bring these sexuate bodies back into contact with her thinking, we might note Ewa Ziarek’s comment that one of the reasons why ‘Irigaray’s own critique of sameness is … insufficient’ is ‘because it fails to take into account what race theorists from Du Bois and Frantz Fanon to Hortense Spillers, Patricia Williams, Evelyn Hammonds, and bell hooks diagnose as the specular economy of race organized around the white look’ (2001: 158). Approached through their work, we might rethink the speculum as a technology of a white male gaze that turns the skin into a projecting screen for racialising fantasies in what Fanon calls the ‘epidermal racial schema’ (2008: 92). The question might then become: how is the specularisation of ‘woman’ refracted via a racialising gaze? And how might we take account of the difference between those whose whiteness secures them as a still-human-Other, and those captured by the production of blackness as a ‘zone of nonbeing’ (Fanon 2008: xii) such that they are refused recognition as human and reduced by a disfiguring grammar to ‘captive flesh’ to be bought and sold, in ways that are simultaneously ‘dehumanizing, ungendering and defacing’ (Spillers 1987: 72)? Building on Spillers, Hartman notes that, ‘Depending on the angle of vision or critical lexicon, the harnessing of the body as an instrument for social and physical reproduction unmakes the slave as gendered subject or reveals the primacy of gender and sexual differentiation in the making of the slave’ (2016: 168). In this context, Irigaray’s analysis might be combined with and extended through the work Maria Lugones, to show that, in the ‘modern colonial gender system’, the reductive binary that constitutes ‘gender’ is a racialised effect of the dereliction of sexual difference that structures ‘the control of sex, its resources, and products’ along racially differentiated lines (Lugones 2008: 16, 12). In parallel fashion, Irigaray’s analysis of a supposedly universal figure of ‘Man’ that turns out to be archetypally male is amplified by Sylvia Wynter’s analysis of the identification of ‘Man’ with a specific sociogenic type: the white, heterosexual, middle-class male that becomes conflated with the human per se, ‘as if it were the universal of the human species’ (Wynter 1995: 43). Although Wynter links this ‘cultural-relative’ conception of Man to an emergent belief in the ‘non-homogeneity’ of the human, her analysis makes it clear that the ‘Others’ of ‘Man’ are 241

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produced in terms of negation and lack in ways that are symptomatic of what Irigaray calls an economy of the Same (1995: 40–42). Nonetheless, Wynter goes further than Irigaray in providing a critical analysis of race as she charts the historical shift between Man1 and Man2. Man1 emerges around the sixteenth century as the image of ‘a rational being and a political subject’ (Wynter with Scott 2000: 176); the peoples of the ‘new world’ that Europeans categorised as ‘indios/indias’ and ‘negros/negras’ are considered ‘Other’ because they are deemed irrational and uncivilised. It is only with the emergence of the concept of race in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Wynter argues, that the native becomes Other because they are black, where blackness becomes the mark of the ‘not quite human’, the ‘subhuman’. Man2 now defines himself not against ‘a negative degree of rationality’, but ‘a negative degree of being human’ (2000: 182). What Irigaray’s analysis misses is the non-homogeneity of the Other that results from racialisation and that means that, even as their sexual specificity is foreclosed, white women still stand on the side of the human.

5 An alternative image of thought: ‘born of métissages’ To re-introject the difference that race makes, we might take up Irigaray’s project of thinking from the side of the Other via Daniel Maximin, who situates the violence produced by the ‘dialectical binaries’ of Same and Other (Maximin 2006: 27) in the conjoined contexts of settler colonialism, the destruction of indigenous Caribbean peoples, and the transatlantic slave trade. As Clarisse Zimra notes in the introduction to her translation of Maximin’s first novel, L’Isolé Soleil (published in 1981 and translated in 1989 as Lone Sun),6 much of Maximin’s work ‘aims at the recuperation of the lost history of an entire people, the black diaspora of the Caribbean’ (Maximin 1989: xi). A crucial part of this history is the story of the human and more-thanhuman resistances to colonialism that ‘scramble’ Western Man’s ‘desire for likeness’ and generate ‘another dialectic’ for a ‘being of relation’ that escapes capture by the logic of Same/Other or Master/Slave (Maximin 2006: 106, 99, 107). While suggesting that there is a ‘common anthropology among the colonized, the black, the female, the savage, which has to do with the fact of their exclusion’ and their position as Other (Maximin 1989: xxiii), Lone Sun centres the contributions of women to this ‘other dialectic’ and questions the identification of resistance with more traditional models of male heroism. His work can thus be read alongside Hartman’s attention to black women’s labours as fugitive resistance that ‘falls outside of the heroic account of the black worker and the general strike’ in ways that ‘augment the text of black radicalism’ (Hartman 2016: 166–67).7 In parallel fashion, Maximin’s work pays sustained attention to the ways in which gender and sexual difference inflect racialisation, interweaving past and present to expose and counter ‘the absence of blacks from white history’ (Zimra in Maximin 1989: xxxix) while re-centring women’s labours of resistance and survival to produce ‘a different definition of heroism and, therefore, a different interpretation of history’ (1989: lv).8 In his extended philosophical and poetic essay, Les fruits du cyclone (2006),9 Maximin offers his own reinterpretation of that history. If Speculum mimics the Western philosophical tradition to undo its grip and open passageways towards an irreducible remainder of sexual difference, Les fruits du cyclone turns to the multiple voices of Afro-Caribbean resistance to a subject who is also a master, drawing on historical figures of slave revolt and marronage, linguistic and musical forms of creolisation, the myths and stories of the griot, the voices of poets of négritude and Wilfredo Lam’s ‘aesthetic of hybrid [métisses] juxtapositions’ (Maximin 2006: 192) as well as a range of more contemporary writers including Édouard Glissant and Derek Walcott. Where the words of western philosophers do appear—occasionally (as in the case of Deleuze) as allies in resistance but more often as complicit in occidental fantasies of domination—they are resituated 242

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in a geopoetic history of the Antillean Islands told from the side of those once deemed ‘the Other’ but whose singular plural voices form a dense mesh that testifies to other ways of being. It is as if the fabric of Western history is reversed, so that the dominant pattern becomes the colonial history of capture and the inventive resistance of survival, and the idealised freedom and universalism of the European Enlightenment project is exposed as misbegotten and misplaced, as fragile as it is violent. This displacement is partly effected by the climatological, geographical, and geological specificity of the Caribbean archipelago, where the elements are translated into the ‘four cataclysms’ of hurricanes, tidal waves, earthquakes and volcanos (Maximin 2006: 14). The colonists were (and still are) confronted with ‘the power of the elements against man’s pretensions to dominate everything’, including hurricanes capable of ‘destroying and sweeping away everything that should not have been built’ (2006: 92). Maximin’s depiction of ‘the revolts of nature’ (2006: 93) refuses the nature/culture divide by positioning the elements as ‘an essential character in the history of the Caribbean’ (2006: 97) even as he preserves the non-anthropocentric character of the elemental, which despite providing ‘what was needed to resist and survive to those fleeing oppression’ (2006: 81) still ‘crush[es] everything, hope just like oppression, reuniting the oppressor and the oppressed without distinction’ (2006: 93). Refusing European dreams of mastery, nature as he puts it ‘lives its life and is not there to furnish metaphors and symbols with which to classify human insanities and torments’ (2006: 105). Equally, Maximin refuses the reduction of the resistance of the enslaved to a merely natural fury that mirrors the fury of the elements and denies them ‘any political consciousness’ (2006: 95). It is the inseparably geographical-historical constitution of the Caribbean from four cataclysms (‘bending under hurricanes, drowned under tidal waves, fractured by earthquakes, roasted alive by their volcanoes’) and ‘four dispersed bloodlines’ (Europe, Africa, Asia, America) that provides the conditions for subverting ‘the dialectical prison of dominant discourse’ (2006: 13–14, 28).10 The freed slave and the decolonised subject is ‘the one who no longer takes up an oppositional stance, but whose hard-won freedom has de-centered the master, displaced the site of mastery beyond the reflection imposed by the mirror that distorts or assimilates, without applying to occupy the place freed up by the master’ (2006: 27). Just as Irigaray seeks a nonoppositional process of self-constitution, and in ways that echo her critique of a specular logic as well as her reminders of human dependence on elemental materialities (Irigaray 1992), so Maximin seeks ‘another dialectic’ (2006: 99), one that displaces the colonising violence of Same versus Other. The elemental forces that materialise as the ‘four cataclysms’ play a crucial role in forging this ‘other’ dialectic that unfolds not in the ‘bilateral cut’ between Same and Other (2006: 27) but across a ‘here’ that is permeated and shaped by that which ‘comes from elsewhere’: between ‘the hell of the island paradise’ and the elements understood as the ‘most profound forces’ of an earth that moves and ‘that arrive from very far away, from very high up, or from remote depths … from the air, from remote regions, from the bottom of the sea’ (2006: 98–99). The islands and their inhabitants are held in the balance between these co-existing contraries (‘équilibrée entre les éléments contraires’ (2006: 118)). At the same time, what also comes from ‘elsewhere’ are slave ships and warships, traders and colonists, the enslaved and displaced, fugitives and rebels. The deliberate mixing of language and cultures designed to undermine the identity and resistance of the enslaved, coupled with the forced imposition of the French language, led instead to a creolisation that resisted the domination of linguistic uniformity as well as racist myths of purity of origin (2006: 30–31). As Suzanne Césaire notes of the métis offspring of the colonisers, ‘they were not expecting this strange burgeoning of their blood’ (2012: 43). In the inventive plurilingualism of creole, and emergent musical traditions improvised from African and European 243

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uprootings, Europe finds itself transformed and Maximin finds ‘the singular plural’11 of the ‘identité métisse’ of the decolonised subject (Maximin 2006: 30). In the image of linguistic and musical métissage, Maximin invokes the material-linguistic traces of a history of racialised, reproductive violence, while affirming a generative crossing or mixing that refuses the fetishization of racial purity and the dialectics of Same versus Other embodied in colonialism. As Erika Hasebe-Ludt, Cynthia Chambers and Carl Leggo note: ‘In various colonial contexts, … words such as métis, mulatto and mestizo (translated as “mixed blood” or “half-breed”) became racial categories bearing negative connotations of animals (and humans) breeding across species’ (Hasebe-Ludt et al. 2009: 36). Like Maximin, these authors seek to reclaim métissage to resist ‘the fear of mixing, and the desire for the pure and untainted’ and to foster counter-practices of reading and writing ‘that thrive on ambiguity and plurality’ (2009: 36). Similarly, Françoise Lionnet describes métissage as a concept and practice that indexes a specific colonial history and ‘points to the ideological and fictional nature of our racial categories’ (1989: 16). In ways that implicitly connect Maximin and Irigaray, Lionnet links fear of métissage to a logic of racial purity ‘born of the West’s monotheistic obsession with the “One” and the “Same”’ (1989: 9) as well as to ‘a patriarchal desire for self-reproduction, selfduplication, within a representational space—female bodies—uncontaminated by the presence of the other’ (1989: 12). Yet like Maximin, Lionnet re-appropriates métissage as a subversive potential to shelter difference, diversity and multiplicity (1989: 5). Between four cataclysms and four continents, Maximin’s Caribbean is shaped by the multiple crossings of the geological, historical, elemental and political, producing singular-relational identities that are ‘born of métissages’, some ‘imposed by the thefts of history’, others ‘chosen from love of a free life’, the result of resistance and its hard-won freedoms (Maximin 2006: 15). The natal alienation of the slave (Patterson 1982), systematically produced as a ‘solitary body’ by being cut off from kin, language and memory, lends a painful urgency to the capacity ‘to find the kinned in the other, a part of oneself in the stranger, a sharing of the unknown, without the marks of origin, clan, ethnic group, skin or territory’. Between creolisation and the ‘imposed métissage of living together with all of nature’s dangers and gifts’, the Caribbean gives birth to ‘an elementary/ elemental solidarity [la solidarité élémentaire] without rites or frontiers’ (2006: 63–64, 100). Maximin finds a figure for métissage as inventive resistance in the colibri, a hummingbird indigenous to Guadeloupe that populates an original Antillean tale collected at the end of the nineteenth century by Lafcadio Hearn (2006: 20).12 This ‘dancing bird’ exists between nature and culture as the ‘symbol of a tremendous power without weight or heaviness, irreducible to submission, even to the point of death, and sometimes beyond it, as according to certain amerindian peoples the spirit of dead warriors settled in the heart of the hummingbird’ (2006: 20). The colibri defends itself against ‘ses aggresseurs terriens’ (its earthbound/land-owning aggressors) but without becoming like them, keeping the lightness essential to flight and to its germinal manoeuvres as it pollinates the flowers (2006: 21). Constructing its nest from ‘un métissage de debris’—a bricolage of stolen remnants and scraps—the colibri builds ‘a haven of beauty to protect itself and the future of its descendants’ (2006: 21). For Maximin, the colibri is ‘the emblem’ of ‘a human form invented in the Caribbean’ (21): ‘neither isolated nor forsaken, but a being of relation’ (2006: 107) and an ‘identité métisse’ (2006: 30).

6 Mêtis and métissage Métissage speaks of the colonisation of women’s bodies in a word drawn from the conceptual apparatus of a violent racialisation. In so doing, it testifies to the asymmetries that characterise 244

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the appropriation of maternal possibilities in the context of the transatlantic slave trade: while white European women were expected to reproduce male citizens (or future generations of settler colonists) without being recognised as citizens themselves, enslaved black women were not only used to increase the availability of fungible black bodies but, as Jennifer Morgan shows, were legislatively transformed into the very mechanism whereby ‘kin’ was turned into property (Morgan 2018).13 As Hartman notes: ‘The reproduction of human property and the social relations of racial slavery were predicated upon the belly’ (Hartman 2016: 168). While we might re-deploy Irigaray’s figure of a ‘placental economy’ to insist on the pregnant body as a fugitive site of métissage that refuses the Same versus Other logic of mastery and ownership, métissage also reminds us why this figure needs to be resituated within a racialising logic that distorts the ontological significance of birth along with the operations of both sexual difference and kinship. As others have noted, the métis of métissage itself has a hybrid genealogy that entwines questions of racial and sexual difference. On the one hand, métissage is ‘culturally specific’ to the French colonial context, as is reinforced by the fact that there is no exact equivalent in English (Lionnet 1989: 13) and by the way in which it is taken up in the French Canadian context where the Métis people have their own distinctive history and culture. On the other, métis lends itself to travelling and mixing, sharing the same Latin root as the Spanish mestizo and displaying the transposability that Lionnet and Maximin link to creolisation: ‘In the island colonies of the Indian Ocean and the West Indies—as in New Orleans—the métis are also called créoles, mulâtres, cafres and cafrines, … the words have even wider semantic ranges in the local creole languages’ (Lionnet 1989: 13). In ways that tie its racialised history to the crucial role of textiles in the transatlantic slave trade (Skeehan 2015), métis ‘derives etymologically from the Latin mixtus, “mixed”, and its primary meaning refers to cloth made from two different fibers, usually cotton for the warp and flax for the woof’ (Lionnet 1989: 14). These connections are amplified by the ways in which the Latin roots of métis can be grafted onto an older, ancient Greek homonym, mêtis, signifying a cunning intelligence that Homer aligns not only with Odysseus but with a genealogy of ancient Greek women and goddesses capable of weaving designs ‘as tangled and purposeful as webs’ (Carson 2016: ‘Candor’).14 As Adriana Cavarero explores, the most famous of these is Penelope, who uses her mêtis to hold off her suitors when it seems Odysseus will not return. Having promised to re-marry once she finishes weaving a death shroud for her father-in-law, she patiently unweaves by night what she weaves together by day, sustaining an ‘anomalous’ space where ‘she belongs to herself’ (Cavarero 1995: 12, 17). If Odysseus tricks the cyclops Polyphemus by calling himself ‘no one’ (Winkler 1990: 144–45), Penelope’s mêtis creates an interval where she is no one’s wife. Cavarero suggests that the back and forth rhythm of Penelope’s gestures forms a counterpoint to the pressing time of action that characterises ‘the history of men, of heroes’ (1995: 5, 13) while subverting the properly productive time of domestic labour. Neither, however, does she withdraw to the realm of the eternal as the thoughts of the philosopher are wont to do. Instead, ‘Penelope weaves a time of cadenced repetition where, day after day, mêtis is actualised in the work of her hands’ (1995: 19). If the task of the thinker, according to Plato, is to unweave the soul from the body so as to re-orient it towards its proper home in the realm of pure ideas (1995: 22–30), Penelope’s wisdom is found in the knowing movement of her hands that show body and soul to be thoroughly woven together. For Cavarero, Penelope points to a horizon of birth, where human beings come into the world as a singular whole in which ‘mind and body are joined indissolubly together’ (1995: 29). Her ‘interweaving of intelligence and the senses’ offers an alternative image for thinking, one that refuses to sever intelligence from corporeal finitude and sexuate specificity. As Detienne 245

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and Vernant observe, mêtis is at odds with ‘the picture of thought and intelligence presented by the philosophers’ and so ‘must be tracked down elsewhere, in areas which the philosopher usually passes over in silence or mentions only with irony or with hostility’ (1978: 4). Cavarero’s own philosophical mêtis mimes the movement of Penelope’s hands as she reverses the fabric of well-known myths, ‘steal[ing] feminine figures from their context, allowing the torn-up fabric to show the knots that hold together the conceptual canvas that hides the original crime’ (Cavarero 1995: 5). By ‘work[ing] on two different looms’ (1995: 7), Cavarero unravels the symbolic fabric that has supported ‘a male subject claiming to be neutral/universal’ (1995: 2), while ‘composing the different figures of a feminine symbolic order’ in which women are defined in relation to one another (1995: 7). Cavarero thereby returns us to the conjoined horizons of sexual difference and birth that orient Irigaray’s thought, while the homonymic crossing of mêtis/métis and the shared connection to weaving links Penelope’s knowing gestures to the concept and practice of métissage. The ‘ontological crime’15 of displacing human beings’ natal horizons is repeated and compounded once mêtis is contorted into métis. Here the ‘mix’ is racialised in ways that turn the maternal body into a passage to captivity and reinforce the natal alienation of slavery (Patterson 1982). If death is the horizon against which the sea-faring Homeric heroes are tested (Cavarero 1995: 20–21), the white gaze of the colonial adventurers projects blackness as a deathly nonbeing, condemned to the ship’s hold or the social death of slavery. And yet, the care that is manifest in Penelope’s hands and that allows her to carve out a space in a world that has no place for her is recalled by Hartman’s account of black women’s labours of care that yield ‘strategies of endurance and subsistence’ (Hartman 2016: 171). Their mêtis, too, is ‘a way of knowing’ that combines ‘flair, wisdom, forethought, subtlety of mind, deception, resourcefulness, vigilance, opportunism, … and experience acquired over the years’ and that is ‘applied to situations which are transient, shifting, disconcerting, and ambiguous’ (Detienne and Vernant 1978: 3). As Lionnet argues, ‘the Greek art of mêtis is an art of transformation and transmutation, an aesthetics of the ruse that allows the weak to survive by escaping through duplicitous means the very system of power intent on destroying them’. Thus, she concludes, it ‘rejoins the signifying practices familiar to all oppressed peoples, in particular to the descendants of slaves in the New World. Such practices had to be learned … as survival tactics within a hostile environment that kept them subjugated, relegated them to the margins’ (1989: 18). This, too, is a time of cadenced repetition, allowing us to resituate Penelope’s cunning un/ weaving in relation to the subversive stitching of a seamstress named Coobah, enslaved on a Jamaican plantation in 1768. By sewing letters and messages onto another slave’s, Silvia’s, smock, as Danielle Skeehan describes, Coobah uses ‘the very tools of her labor’ to ‘tell stories of love and kinship, as well as sexual exploitation and loss’ (2015: 105).16 As Skeehan shows, Coobah refigures thinking as an embodied mêtis that materialises the complexity of enslaved women’s knowledge of power relations, strategies of survival, local ecologies and remembered traditions. In her hands, métissage recalls the colonising racialisation of the Western tradition even as her knowing gestures contest what counts as thought as well as the image of bodies that think.

7 Decolonising mêtis If métissage is archaic, it is subversively so: a painful word that belongs to a past that echoes through the ‘afterlives of slavery’ in the present (Hartman 2007), while attesting to beginnings that are always impure, mixed, springing from a constitutive inseparability of one and another that refuses the divisive logic of the One versus the Other as well as the speculative archē of race.17 Resituated in this context, Irigaray’s insistence on a ‘two [that] does not divide into 246

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ones’ and ‘relationships that defy being cut into units’ (1985: 236) can be allied with resistance to the deathly arithmetic of the slave ledgers. We might then re-read Irigaray alongside Katherine McKittrick’s response to this ‘archival numerical evidence’ (McKittrick 2014: 16). For McKittrick, the task is ‘to write blackness by ethically honoring but not repeating anti-black violences’. She suggests that this can be done ‘through reading the mathematics of these violences as possibilities that are iterations of black life that cannot be contained by black death’ (McKittrick 2014: 20). The incalculable entanglements that shape/take shape within the pregnant body, and that as Hartman describes can be extended through black women’s labours of care, testify to the possibility of ‘count[ing] it out differently’: honouring ‘the ways in which blackness is archived as a violent beginning’ while insisting that although ‘[t]he numbers set the stage for our stories of survival—what is not there is living’ (2014: 23–24). In this fugitive living that persists as an elsewhere in the midst of violence, ‘the accounts overflow, calculation is lost’ (Irigaray 1992: 58); hence the necessity of attending not only to ‘the unbearable and unutterable’ but to ‘the unseeable and the invisible, the uncountable and unindexed, outside the scourge, that which cannot be seen or heard or read but is always there’ (McKittrick 2014: 22). The ‘fugitive movement in and out of the frame, bar, or whatever externally imposed social logic’ that constitutes this ‘stolen life’ (Moten 2008: 179) depends on black women’s labours of care that ‘enable those “who were never meant to survive” to sometimes do just that’ (Hartman 2016: 171). In Hartman’s insistence that ‘The forms of care, intimacy, and sustenance exploited by racial capitalism, most importantly, are not reducible to or exhausted by it’ (2016: 171), Irigaray’s insistence that ‘They also remain elsewhere’ (1985b: 76) is rewritten so as to centre black women’s labours in the wake of slavery. This ‘elsewhere’ echoes in Christina Sharpe’s depiction of ‘black people…[as] constituted through and by vulnerability to overwhelming force though not only known to themselves and to each other by that force’ (2012, 828). With Hartman and Sharpe, then, we might re-route the direction of Irigaray’s project by answering the call of her guiding question ‘But what if the “object” started to speak?’ (1985a: 135) with Moten’s response: ‘The history of blackness is testament of the fact that objects can and do resist’ (2003: 1). The direct link to this ‘unbearable and unutterable’ history (McKittrick 2014: 22) makes métissage a difficult, searing word, rooted as it is in the reproductive violence of slavery. Yet it is because it recalls—and refuses to forget—this history, that métissage attests to black women’s bodies and their labours—‘coerced and freely given’ (Hartman 2016: 171)—centring their mêtis of survival and care in the conceptualisation of decolonial struggles in an anti-black world. Borrowing the connection Anne Carson makes between the practice of weaving and ‘that skien in the belly’ (2016: ‘Candor’), mêtis takes us back to métissage in its intimate connection to the insurgent maternity of black and enslaved women, whose generative powers have been so pervasively expropriated yet whose distinct modes of knowing-caring continue to resist capture and sustain fugitive life. Maximin foregrounds both the work of memory and the futurity harboured in these labours at the end of Les fruits du cyclone, where he invokes ‘the presence in every corner of the world of old creole women spinning and weaving all cultures on the universal loom of sap and blood’ (2006: 218).18 By holding the violence of a colonising history together with the generative potential found in unapologetically impure beginnings, Maximin’s invocation of métissage recalls Irigaray’s improper crossings of Western philosophy which seek to derail and re-route it via the perspective of sexual difference. I am hesitant, though, to call Irigaray’s own textual and philosophical practice a mode of métissage, despite Lionnet’s compelling description of métissage as a ‘dynamic model of relationality’ that exists in different forms ‘in different geographical contexts … produc[ing] widely varying configurations, hierarchies, dissymmetries, and contradictions’ (1995: 4). 247

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It might be helpful here to recall Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s comments on the multi-valence of ‘queer’—a close cousin, in many respects, of métissage (‘Blackness is always queered: heteronormativity, too, being produced along an axis of race’ [Sharpe 2012: 829]). ‘[O]ne of the things that “queer” can refer to’, Kosofsky Sedgwick notes, is ‘the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically’ (2013: 8). Yet crucially, ‘queer’ can also denote ‘same-sex sexual object choice, lesbian or gay, whether or not it is organized around multiple criss-crossings of definitional lines’. And, ‘given the historical and contemporary force of the prohibitions against every same-sex sexual expression, for anyone to disavow those meanings, or to displace them from the term’s definitional center, would be to dematerialize any possibility of queerness itself’ (2013: 8). In a similar way, decoupling the ‘criss-crossings’ of métissage from its specific, racialised history and geographies risks dematerialising its force as a decolonising practice and decentring women of colour from the mêtis of fugitive resistance that their labours have sustained. To avoid repeating a colonising gesture by turning métissage into a ‘universal’ figure for textual multiplicity and indeterminacy that is equally available to everyone means refusing a return to the a-perspectival thinking Irigaray and others have critiqued, and instead, thinking about one’s own place in the weave. My aim then is not to re-name Irigaray’s textual practice as métissage but rather to attend to métissage as a call to re-read her texts by entangling them with their largely concealed colonial context, reweaving them with those of Maximin, Wynter, Hartman and McKittrick so as to give them new meaning in ways that support a more fully decolonial mêtis. With Maximin, though in ways that call on me to attend to the violent history that subtends my white settler privilege, I think it is worth holding onto métissage—and to the criss-crossings of métis/mêtis—as figures for thought that unsettle the continued and often invisible centring of whiteness in the feminist retrieval of sexuate difference, attest to the labours of women of colour in the refiguring of resistance, and contribute to the decolonising of philosophy as well as to a decolonising thinking.

Notes 1 Despite the ways in which some of Irigaray’s writings seem hostile to trans- and intersex people, gestating bodies take many different forms and there is no reason why, for example, transmen cannot be positioned as sexuate bodies that birth or as the other from whom one is born, in an event that is as existential and ontological as it is corporeal. 2 On the figure of the interval in Irigaray, see Hill (2012). 3 For a helpful discussion, see Chanter (1995: 239–45). 4 On subversive mimesis, see Grosz (1989), Schor (1994), Weed (1994, 2010), Whitford (1991). 5 See for example Chanter’s, Deutscher’s, and Ziarek’s contributions to Tzelepis and Athanasiou (2010). For an essay that mobilises Irigaray for a critical analysis of settler colonialism, see Faulkner (2019). 6 One cannot help but think of the ‘lone sun’ of Platonic metaphysics that Irigaray critiques; Zimra’s introduction references Speculum directly (Maximin 1989: liii). 7 Both Hartman and Maximin are engaged in an appreciative but critical dialogue with C. L. R. James’ The Black Jacobins (see Zimra’s Introduction to Maximin 1989: lvii). 8 In writings and interviews, Maximin consistently pays tribute to the importance of women thinkers and authors for his work, particularly Hélène Cixous with whom he studied in Paris and Suzanne Césaire (Maximin edited a 2009 collection of her writings, The Great Camouflage (2012)), along with Marie Chauvet, Clarice Lispector, Angela Davis, and Anaïs Nin. See Maximin (1989: xxiv–xxv). 9 Translations from this text are my own with Dr Sara Miglietti (School of Advanced Study, the Warburg Institute); I also consulted Last (2015) to whose analysis of Maximin’s work I am indebted. 10 While the figure of the Caribbean archipelago as a synthesis of ‘four cataclysms’ generated by the four elements and ‘four bloodlines’ from ‘four continents’ can be read as a rewriting of Heidegger’s

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11 12 13 14 15

16

17 18

fourfold, its genesis is more intimately connected to Césaire’s essay, where she writes in a line that Maximin references often of ‘the hummingbird women…women of four races and dozens of bloodlines’ (Césaire 2012: 40). While he is not cited, the reference to ‘singular plural’ (‘le singulier pluriel’) signals the work of Jean-Luc Nancy (1996). Lone Sun, too, starts with a ‘flight of colobris’ (Maximin 1989: 1). See Morgan (2018: 1) on Act XII of the 1662 Laws of Virginia that encoded the principle of ‘Partus sequitur ventrem’: ‘all children borne in this country shall be held bond or free only according to the condition of the mother’. In ways not unconnected to our theme, ‘Mêtis’ is also the goddess who is the mother of Athena and whose maternal powers, according to the ancient Greek myth, are literally swallowed whole by Zeus (Hesiod 1914: lines 929a–929t). I borrow the concept of an ‘ontological crime’ from Cavarero’s later work on the specific form of political violence she calls ‘horrorism’, which consists in the ‘killing of uniqueness’ and the destruction of the human condition of relationality and vulnerability that is rooted in birth (see Cavarero 2009: 29–30). Another etymological thread one might follow here is the shared Latin root of textile and text, tex re, which as Skeehan notes, means to construct or to weave, while ‘the Latin, textus, means “that which is woven”, a “web”, or “texture”’ (2015: 112). Thus, ‘Caribbean women’s tactile literacies’ as manifest in the material texts of cloth and clothing participate in black Atlantic publics as well as ‘in Enlightenment-era knowledge production traditionally understood as driven by print’ (2015: 113). On the differences between the concepts of origin and beginnings, see Söderbäck (2019: 244–45). In this foregrounding of the intimacy between métissage and black women’s labours, Maximin’s invocation of métissage differs from that of Glissant, with whom his work is in dialogue; reading Glissant through Irigaray, Max Hantel suggests that the absence of sexual difference in Glissant’s work undermines a radical potential that could only be realised via ‘a sexual difference theory of creolization’ (Hantel 2014: 15).

References Carson, A. (2016) Float, New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Cavarero, A. (1995) In Spite of Plato: A Feminist Rewriting of Ancient Philosophy, (trans.) S. AnderliniD’Onofrio and Á. O’Healy, Cambridge: Polity Press. Cavarero, A. (2009) Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence, (trans.) W. McCuaig, New York: Columbia University Press. Césaire, S. (2012) The Great Camouflage: Writings of Dissent (1941–1945), (ed.) K. L. Walker, (trans.) D. Maximin, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Chanter, T. (1995) Ethics of Eros: Irigaray’s Rewriting of the Philosophers, London: Routledge. Chanter, T. (2010) Irigaray’s Challenge to the Fetishistic Hegemony of the Platonic One and Many, in E. Tzelepis and A. Athanasiou (eds.), Rewriting Difference: Luce Irigaray and ‘the Greeks’, Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 217–229. Detienne, M. and J.-P. Vernant (1978) Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society, (trans.) J. Lloyd, Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Harvester Press, Humanities Press. Deutscher, P. (2010) Conditionalities, Exclusions, Occlusions, in E. Tzelepis and A. Athanasiou (eds.), Rewriting Difference: Luce Irigaray and ‘the Greeks’, Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 247–258. Fanon, F. (2008) Black Skin, White Masks, (trans.) R. Philcox, New York: Grove Press. Faulkner, J. (2019) Settler-Colonialism’s “Miscarriage”, Angelaki 24.3: 137–154. Grosz, E. (1989) Sexual Subversions, Sydney: Allen and Unwin. Hantel, M. (2014) Towards a Sexual Difference Theory of Creolization, Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy, 22.1: 1–18. Hartman, S. (2007) Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Hartman, S. (2016) The Belly of the World: A Note on Black Women’s Labors, Souls 18.1: 166–173. Hasebe-Ludt, E., C. M. Chambers and C. Leggo (2009) Life Writing and Literary Métissage as an Ethos for Our Times, New York: Peter Lang. Hesiod (1914) Theogony, The Homeric Hymns and Homerica, (trans.) H. G. Evelyn-White, London: Heinemann.

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Rachel Jones Hill, R. (2012) The Interval: Relation and Becoming in Irigaray, Aristotle, and Bergson, New York: Fordham University Press. Irigaray, L. (1985a) Speculum of the Other Woman, (trans.) G. C. Gill, New York: Columbia University Press. Irigaray, L. (1985b) This Sex Which Is Not One, (trans.) C. Porter and C. Burke, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Irigaray, L. (1992) Elemental Passions, (trans.) J. Collie and J. Still, London: Athlone. Irigaray, L. (1993a) An Ethics of Sexual Difference, (trans.) C. Burke and G. C. Gill, London: Athlone. Irigaray, L. (1993b) Je, tu, nous, (trans.) A. Martin, London: Routledge. Irigaray, L. (2001) To Be Two, (trans.) M. Rhodes and M. Cocito-Monoc, New York: Routledge. Irigaray, L. (2008) The Return, in M. Green (ed.), Teaching, London: Continuum, 219–230. Kosofsky Sedgwick, E. (2013) Queer and Now, in D. Hall et al. (eds.), The Routledge Queer Studies Reader, New York: Routledge, 3–17. Kuppers, P. (2007) The Anarcha Project: Performing in the Medical Plantation, in S. Sarker (ed.), Sustainable Feminisms, Bingley: Emerald Publishing, 127–141. Last, A. (2015) Fruit of the Cyclone: Undoing Geopolitics through Geopoetics, Geoforum 64: 56–64. Lionnet, F. (1989) Autobiographical Voices: Race, Gender, Self-Portraiture, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Lionnet, F. (1995). Postcolonial Representations: Women, Literature, Identity, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Lugones, M. (2008) The Coloniality of Gender, Worlds and Knowledges Otherwise 2.2: On the Decolonial (II): Gender and Decoloniality: 1–17. Maximin, D. (1989) Lone Sun, (trans.) C. Zimra, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Maximin, D. (2006) Les fruits du cyclone: Une géopoétique de la Caraïbe, Paris: Seuil. McKittrick, K. (2014) Mathematics Black Life, The Black Scholar: Journal of Black Studies and Research 44:2: 16–28 Morgan, J. L. (2018) Partus Sequitur Ventrem: Law, Race, and Reproduction in Colonial Slavery, Small Axe 55: 2–17. Moten, F. (2003) In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Moten, F. (2008) The Case of Blackness, Criticism 50.2: 177–128. Nancy, J.-L. (1996) Être singulier pluriel, Paris: Éditions Galilée. Patterson, O. (1982) Slavery and Social Death, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Schor, N. (1994) This Essentialism which is Not One, in C. Burke, N. Schor and M. Whitford (eds.), Engaging With Irigaray, New York: Columbia University Press, 57–78. Sharpe, C. (2012) Blackness, Sexuality, and Entertainment, American Literary History, 24.4: 827–841. Skeehan, D. C. (2015) Caribbean Women, Creole Fashioning, and the Fabric of Black Atlantic Writing, The Eighteenth Century 56:1: 105–123. Söderbäck, F. (2019) Revolutionary Time: On Time and Difference in Kristeva and Irigaray, Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Spillers, H. (1987) Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book, Diacritics, 17.2: 64–81. Tzelepis, E. and A. Athanasiou (eds.) (2010) Rewriting Difference: Luce Irigaray and ‘the Greeks’, Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Weed, E. (1994). The Question of Style, in C. Burke, N. Schor and M. Whitford (eds.), Engaging With Irigaray, New York: Columbia University Press, 79–109. Weed, E. (2010) The Question of Reading Irigaray, in E. Tzelepis and A. Athanasiou (eds.), Rewriting Difference: Luce Irigaray and ‘the Greeks’, Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 15–32. Whitford, M. (1991) Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine, London: Routledge. Winkler, J. J. (1990) The Constraints of Desire, New York: Routledge. Wynter, S. (1995) 1492: A New World View, in V. Hyatt and R. Nettleford (eds.), Race, Discourse and the Origin of the Americas, Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Wynter, S. (2003) Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument, The New Centennial Review 3.3: 257–337. Wynter, S. and D. Scott (2000) The Re-Enchantment of Humanism: An Interview, Small Axe 8: 119–207. Ziarek, E. (2010) “Women on the Market”: On Sex, Race and Commodification, in E. Tzelepis and A. Athanasiou (eds.), Rewriting Difference: Luce Irigaray and ‘the Greeks’, Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 203–216. Ziarek, E. (2001) An Ethics of Dissensus, Stanford: Stanford University Press.

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PART V

The efficacy of thinking from Sextus to Bataille

18 THINKING WITHOUT COMMITMENT Two models Richard Bett

1 Introduction Philosophical scepticism in the ancient Greco-Roman world centres around suspension of judgment. Two different intellectual traditions are generally considered sceptical, given the importance they accord to this: the Pyrrhonian tradition, claiming inspiration from the obscure figure of Pyrrho of Elis (c. 360–270 BC—though a continuous Pyrrhonian movement does not seem to have started until the first century BC), and the Academy, the school founded by Plato, from the headship of Arcesilaus (c. 268–242 BC) until its demise as an institution in the early first century BC. The Pyrrhonists were the ones who (at least in the later phase of the tradition) actually called themselves sceptics. But already in antiquity the Academy, during the period noted, was seen as having enough in common with Pyrrhonism to justify treating them together for many purposes. We have extensive surviving writings from one Pyrrhonist, Sextus Empiricus, who belongs near the end of the tradition (probably around 200 CE). No works survive from the Academics, and in fact neither of the two leading Academic sceptics, Arcesilaus and Carneades, wrote anything at all. But Cicero, who studied at the Academy in its final phase, wrote a good deal about them, especially in his (partially surviving) Academica, and from him and other sources we can piece together a fair amount of information. In what follows I shall concentrate on Sextus and on Carneades (214–129 BC), probably the greatest Academic sceptic. The central question for us is simply this: what kind of philosophical thinking is possible for someone who suspends judgment? Both Sextus and Carneades clearly talk a great deal about philosophical topics, and offer arguments that seem designed to lead to certain conclusions. (Hence, unlike some varieties of thinking explored in other chapters in this volume, the kind of thinking involved here is clearly discursive or propositional.) But how can they do this, consistently with suspension of judgment?

2 Sextus Empiricus’ thinking That this is an issue needing to be sorted out is already suggested by the term skeptikos itself, which means ‘inquirer’. At the opening of his best known work, Outlines of Pyrrhonism (hereafter cited as PH, the transliterated initials of the title in Greek), Sextus says that, in contrast 253

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both to those who think they have discovered the truth and to those who have decided that the truth is undiscoverable,1 the sceptics are still investigating (1.1–3). But for someone who suspends judgment, what can this ‘investigation’ amount to? Some answers are suggested by Sextus’ succinct explanation of what scepticism is. ‘The sceptical ability’, he says, ‘is one that places in opposition things that appear and things that are thought in any way whatsoever, from which, because of the equal strength in the opposing objects and accounts, we come first to suspension of judgment, but after this to tranquility’ (PH 1.8). Suspension of judgment, then, comes about through the juxtaposition of opposing arguments and impressions that have ‘equal strength’—that is, that strike the reader or listener as equally convincing. And the sceptics’ ‘ability’ is the ability to assemble—or, in many cases, to devise for themselves—a series of opposing arguments and impressions that will have this characteristic. Though a sceptic may at times argue for certain conclusions, these are always intended to be balanced against considerations that tend in the opposite direction, leading to suspension of judgment about the topic in question. This certainly involves a lot of intellectual agility and engagement; it also involves keeping an open mind, including even about the possibility that the truth might eventually be discovered—for having closed off that possibility would mean that, at least on one important topic, one was no longer, in fact, suspending judgment. There is therefore some point to Sextus’ claim that the sceptic is ‘investigating’, but this is not investigation in the sense of an active attempt to discover the truth (as one might initially read him to be saying). The sceptic did start out as someone trying to discover the truth (PH 1.12, 26), but this gets transformed into an ongoing search for materials with which to construct the ‘oppositions’ that will generate suspension of judgment.2 Although the reference to tranquility as the outcome of suspension of judgment is a distinctively Pyrrhonian idea (and not one we need explore in this context), much of this account could apply to Carneades as well. But for the moment I will leave Carneades aside and concentrate on Sextus. A number of questions can be raised concerning scepticism as so described. One that dates back to antiquity—indeed, that predates Sextus himself—is how can you act if you suspend judgment about everything; doesn’t action require making up your mind about certain things (the so-called apraxia or ‘inactivity’ objection)? While this seems to have been meant primarily as a challenge to the possibility of ordinary, everyday behaviour, examining Sextus’ answer to it will also start to give some insight into the sceptic’s thinking, including philosophical thinking. Sextus says that the sceptic’s criterion of action, or way of settling what to do, is the apparent (PH 1.21). Whether or not things really are the way they appear is another question, on which the sceptic will not take a stand. But that things appear a certain way is not up for discussion, and this can serve as a guide for how to act on any given occasion. Sextus implies that there is nothing unusual in this, when he says that the sceptic lives by following the apparent ‘according to the observance of life’ (PH 1.23)—that is, according to the way people generally react to the conditions in which they find themselves. Whether he thinks ordinary people, like the sceptics themselves, are free from any commitments concerning the real nature of things is another question. But at least as far as the business of daily life is concerned, it probably makes little difference, and in any case the way things appear is enough for the sceptic to act in very much the same way as people normally act. More specifically, Sextus draws attention to four broad categories of appearances that are particularly salient in shaping the sceptic’s decisions and actions. The first of these is the ‘guidance of nature’, about which he simply says, ‘By natural guidance we are naturally such as to perceive and to think’ (PH 1.23–24). A great many of the ways things appear, then, are simply products of our perceptual and cognitive makeup. Given how our sense-organs are 254

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constructed, we will see things as red or green, hear things as shrill, etc. And something similar applies, it is suggested, when it comes to thinking: given how our minds are constructed, we will engage in certain characteristic thought-patterns in light of the circumstances we are faced with. This story certainly needs some filling out, and again, the focus seems to be on the everyday thinking shared by all of us, rather than on philosophical thinking. But at least we have the beginnings of a picture of how, on Sextus’ picture, thinking is possible for a sceptic. More light is shed on this matter when Sextus addresses an objection posed to the sceptics by their opponents the dogmatists—that is, philosophers who do have theories or doctrines; and here the issue does pertain specifically to philosophical thinking. The objection, in its most general form, is that ‘the sceptic cannot either investigate or think about the things they [i.e., the dogmatists themselves] hold doctrines about’ (PH 2.1).3 The reason is that the sceptic must either grasp the things the dogmatists are talking about, or not. If they do not grasp them, they are obviously not in a position to discuss them. But if they do grasp them, then they have conceded the reality of these things, and so there is no room for scepticism about them (PH 2.2–3). Sextus’ reply is, what do you mean by ‘grasp’ (or ‘apprehend’, katalambanein)? If ‘grasping’ something does include affirming the reality of that thing (and is also required in order even to discuss something), then no one could dispute the views of people who believe in things they themselves do not, or, for that matter, inquire into things they themselves do not yet have firm views about; and these consequences would obviously be just as problematic for a dogmatist as for a sceptic (PH 2.4–9). If, on the other hand, ‘grasping’ means just ‘thinking about’, without necessarily believing that the things thought about are real, then the sceptic is no worse off than anyone else. ‘Thinking about’ something, in this sense, can include understanding some complicated conceptual connections. If one is discussing dogmatic theories, one must of course understand what the dogmatists are talking about. The Epicureans, for example, have a precise conception of what an atom is: it is an indivisible particle having size, shape and weight, and no other intrinsic properties. And the Stoics have a precise conception of ‘apprehension’ (katalêpsis): to apprehend something is to assent to an apprehensive appearance, which is an appearance that (given a much-discussed three-part definition, the nuances of which we need not get into4) could not be false. In order to discuss these topics, the sceptic must of course grasp the dogmatists’ conceptions of them, in the sense of knowing what the dogmatists mean when they say ‘atom’ or ‘apprehension’. But it does not follow that the sceptic must take on board these conceptions in the sense of accepting the necessary and sufficient conditions posited by the dogmatists for the existence of these things, let alone accepting that they do indeed exist. Sextus’ actual wording in this context is worth some attention. He says, ‘The sceptic is not, I think, prohibited from conceiving [noêseôs], which comes about by reason5 from the things that strike passively [pathêtikôs] and appear to him plainly, and do not at all bring in the reality of the things conceived’ (PH 2.10). Thinking, for the sceptic, is above all something passive. In the philosophical context, one notices the concepts the dogmatists employ, including the conceptual connections internal to them, but one does not in any way endorse them; one thinks of them simply as what the Epicureans call atoms, or what the Stoics call apprehension—convenient for use in debate with them, and perhaps for other purposes too, but not to be regarded as embodying any insight into the things’ real nature. And one’s acquisition and use of everyday concepts will be of the same passive character. Concepts will form in one’s head as one grows up, and perhaps new concepts will come along when one is an adult and already a sceptic; these too can be adopted as useful ways of classifying things, without at any point being seen as the only way, or the correct way. They are the way the people in one’s environment divide things up—and, for all one knows, some of them may even be products of one’s nature as a human 255

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being; that is good enough to make them suitable for conversing with one’s neighbours. All of this can be called a use of reason (logos), as Sextus does in the passage I just quoted; both when one is debating with the dogmatists, and when one is thinking about (for example) what to do tomorrow, one is employing the reasoning powers that one was born with and/or was acculturated into. Non-sceptical philosophers may have more elevated conceptions of reason and what it can achieve. But the term need not be surrendered to them; sceptics, with their more limited ambitions, can be said to reason too, as can those who do not think about philosophy at all.6 This takes us back to the passage about following the appearances. This too is described as occurring passively (PH 1.22), and we can now see more clearly what Sextus has in mind here, particularly as applied to thinking. One of the four major categories of appearances is the laws and customs of one’s society (PH 1.23–24). While Sextus does not say so, there could very well be a linguistic or conceptual dimension to this; certain ways of thinking are standardly inculcated in one society, but not in another. But, as we saw, where Sextus does explicitly place thinking in his taxonomy of appearances is under the heading ‘guidance of nature’. He does not, of course, have any theory of human nature in mind in saying this. But his thought seems to be that, at least at the most basic level, the way we think, like the way we perceive with the senses, is a function of how we are as human beings. This will include our use of concepts that do not seem to be culturally specific, which the sceptic can use along with everyone else, albeit in the passive way we have noted. But it also no doubt includes certain habits of inference: for example, accepting both poles of a contradiction would rub us the wrong way, whereas accepting Q, when presented with P and ‘If P then Q’, or expecting the sun to rise tomorrow given that it has always done so before, feels natural. That we think in these ways is just how we are built; it does not need justification, and indeed, Sextus later casts doubt on both deduction and induction, understood as ways of penetrating to how things really are (PH 2.193–204). That is no reason not to follow these ways of thinking—again, passively, and without taking a stand on whether they fit reality. It will be seen that, on this picture, there is no fundamental difference between the sceptic’s philosophical thinking and the sceptic’s thinking in ordinary life. I have looked at two passages of Sextus, one addressing an objection concerning the sceptic’s philosophical thinking, the other primarily focused on how the sceptic’s mind works in everyday life. But the picture of thinking that one gets from each is essentially the same. There will be concepts, vocabulary and topics peculiar to the philosophical context, and the reasoning involved in discussing these will no doubt be more complex and elaborate than in everyday contexts of deliberation. But the sceptic’s basic attitude will be the same whether in philosophical debate or considering what to buy at the supermarket. One follows the reasoning tendencies and the preferences that one finds within one, be they natural or cultural in origin, going along with the way things strike one, without any commitment one way or the other as to whether this tracks the truth. This passive acceptance, for practical purposes, of how things appear may seem at odds with Sextus’ very energetic argumentation in the course of his scrutiny of dogmatic theories. But Sextus will insist that he simply follows whatever trains of thought appear to him at the time most useful for generating the situation of ‘equal strength’ (isostheneia, PH 1.8) among the opposing positions he is assembling with a view to suspension of judgment—this ‘equal strength’ itself being simply a matter of the relative psychological force with which these different positions strike the sceptic, or the audience, on that occasion. It is the same even when he is explaining the sceptical outlook itself. Very early in Book 1 of Outlines of Pyrrhonism, which gives a general overview of Pyrrhonist scepticism, he says ‘that on none of the things to be talked about are we positive that they are absolutely as we say, but we report on each one like a case-study,7 according to how it 256

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then appears to us’ (PH 1.4). He reinforces the point at the end of his account of the sceptic’s reliance on the appearances, adding ‘and we say all this undogmatically’ (PH 1.24). Again, as regards everyday thinking, there is a question how close this persistently noncommittal attitude is to the thinking of ordinary people, and what Sextus’ own take on this question is. I shall return to this in closing. For now, I sum up this section by reiterating that Sextus has proposed to us a model of thinking that allows complicated exercises of rationality, but that refuses to take any position on the truth of how things appear, either in philosophical or in everyday contexts. This is what will turn out to be the crucial difference between Sextus’ model of sceptical thinking and that of Carneades, to whom I now turn.

3 Carneades’ thinking The reports on Carneades do not speak explicitly of suspension of judgment. But they do speak of something that, for our purposes, amounts to the same thing. Carneades, we are told, was forthright in his opposition to assent—that is, to definitely declaring something as true. Cicero, passing on what was said about Carneades by his successor Clitomachus, who wrote a great many books about him, speaks of Carneades as banishing assent from our minds as if driving out ‘a wild and savage monster’, and compares this achievement to a labour of Hercules (Acad. 2.108). Of course, the opposition to assent only makes sense on the assumption that one does not in fact have knowledge. But that is taken for granted in the context of the sceptical Academy, and hence assent is here spoken of in the same breath as ‘opinion and rashness’, where ‘opinion’ refers to assent to an impression that is not ‘apprehensive’, in the Stoic sense noted earlier—that is, not guaranteed to be correct. Carneades, then, is reported as suspending judgment, and this looks much like the attitude of Sextus. Yet there are also reports of Carneades holding views, including philosophical views. One of the most striking has to do with this very notion of apprehension. The Stoic Antipater is said to have objected against the Academics that if they are going to assert that nothing can be apprehended, they should at least claim to apprehend that. But Carneades, representing the Academic position, is reported as replying that, on the contrary, this would be hopelessly inconsistent; if nothing can be apprehended, that very fact cannot be apprehended either (Acad. 2.28). Carneades thus avoids claiming to have apprehended anything, and this at least is consistent with the avoidance of assent discussed in the previous paragraph. What he notably does not do, however, is reject the attribution to himself of the claim that nothing can be apprehended. And the same claim is attributed to Carneades (and to other Academics) by Sextus (PH 1.3, 226). So it looks as if Carneades thought it was possible to hold philosophical views without assenting to them, and hence without deviating from suspension of judgment. How could this be? Part of the answer undoubtedly involves Carneades’ elaborate account of the ‘persuasive appearance’ (pithanê phantasia) and how it can serve as a basis for choice and action. Sextus reports on this in some detail in his Against the Logicians, and there are also frequent references to it in Cicero. It is clearly designed as a response to the same apraxia or ‘inactivity’ objection that confronted Sextus, and the basic idea is that one can follow appearances that are persuasive without committing oneself to their truth. According to Sextus’ summary of Carneades, a persuasive appearance is an appearance that feels (quite a bit) as if it is true. Objectively speaking, appearances are either true or false. But to the person experiencing them, they can come across as true whether or not they actually are true (or as false even though they may be true). A persuasive appearance is one that comes across as true to a considerable degree; and among those that rise above that threshold, there is room 257

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for further variations in degrees of persuasiveness. Of course, persuasiveness is not a guarantee of truth. But the fact that persuasive appearances occasionally lead us astray is no reason not to use them to guide our decisions and actions; most of the time they do not do so—and that is the best that could be said about any method for deciding what to do (Sextus, M 7.168–75). This may seem to introduce an objective judgment: the appearance feels as if it is true, and mostly that turns out to be correct. But it is not hard to construe this in sceptical terms—that is, in terms of the consistency of the original appearance with other subsequent appearances.8 Nor do we have to rest content with the persuasive appearances that just, as it were, happen to us. It is possible to increase the level of persuasiveness by further research; and again, consistency among multiple appearances is one key factor in this. If the original persuasive appearance turns out to be consistent with many other appearances bearing upon the same subject, then it becomes all the more persuasive—and here too there are differences of degree (M 7.176–81). Sextus uses the analogy of a doctor judging by multiple symptoms, rather than by just one, that a patient has a fever. In addition, one can actively check the reliability of any given appearance, seeing whether there are any factors that might put it into question; if not, its persuasiveness is greater still (M 7.181–83).9 At no point do we reach any kind of guarantee of truth. But we can take active steps to make the way things appear to us convey as strong an impression of truth as possible. Again, as with Sextus’ account of the sceptic’s use of appearances, this account of the persuasive appearance seems primarily designed to explain how the decisions and actions of ordinary life are possible if one suspends judgment. But here too, there is no reason why it could not also be used to explain how thinking, including philosophical thinking, is possible. A line of abstract argument can appear persuasive just as much as a mundane sensory impression. An important difference between Sextus and Carneades is, however, now in view. Whereas Sextus carefully avoided any mention of truth in his description of how the sceptic followed appearances—one simply lets the appearances nudge one in one direction or another—Carneades very deliberately constructs his account in terms of an orientation towards the truth.10 A persuasive appearance feels as if it is true; that is what makes it a good guide for decision and action. And the more that feeling can be increased, by the kinds of measures just mentioned, the better—at least, if the circumstances allow and the matter is important enough to be worth the trouble (M 7.184–89). Now, at this point, one may wonder how this is consistent with Carneades’ reported opposition to assent. If one acts on a persuasive appearance, has one not in fact decided that it is true, rather than simply feeling as if it is true? Carneades’ Stoic opponents would certainly say so. We are told that according to both Chrysippus and Antipater—Stoics who were, respectively, earlier than Carneades and his younger contemporary—it is simply nonsense to say, as the Academics did, that action on the basis of a certain appearance is possible without assenting to it (Plutarch, On Stoic Self-Contradictions 1057A). Yet Cicero, speaking on behalf of the Academics, says that, while aiming to get as close to the truth as possible, ‘we hold many things as persuasive, which we can easily follow but scarcely affirm’—by contrast with their dogmatic opponents, who have no doubt that the things they maintain are true (Acad. 2.7–8, cf. 2.66). Though Cicero does not mention Carneades by name here, it seems clear, if we bear in mind everything we have seen attributed to him so far, that he too would have needed some such combination of ideas. Here we must examine another important passage of Cicero, which does refer specifically to Carneades—or rather, to Clitomachus explaining Carneades (Acad. 2.102—note ‘in almost these words’, his fere verbis; though this cannot be literally true, since Clitomachus wrote in Greek, not Latin, Cicero is clearly trying to be as faithful and precise as possible). Clitomachus, as transmitted by Cicero, says the following: 258

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The wise person is said to withhold assent in two ways: in one way, when this is understood—that he doesn’t entirely assent to anything11—in another, when he checks himself from responding so as to approve or disapprove of something, so that he neither denies nor affirms anything; and that since this is so, he accepts the former [kind of withholding of assent], so that he never assents, but holds on to the latter [kind of assent], so that, following probability,12 whenever this is present or is lacking, he can respond either yes or no. And indeed, since the person who on all matters restrains himself from assenting nonetheless does favour moving and doing something, there remain impressions of the kind by which we can be excited to action, as well as things we answer on either side when questioned, merely by following what appears that way, so long as it’s without assent; however, not all impressions of that kind are approved, but the ones that are not impeded by anything. (Acad. 2.104) While some of the details are less clear than they might be—hence the need for my insertions—the basic idea is clear enough: there is a kind of assent that is to be rigorously avoided, and another kind that is permitted to the Academic sceptic. Once the two kinds have been introduced, the term ‘assent’ is reserved for the stronger kind that the sceptic avoids; and this makes sense, since this must be the kind of assent that Carneades is elsewhere credited with eliminating. But the weaker kind, also referred to as ‘approval’ or ‘following’, is nonetheless sufficient for action and also for discussion (note the reference to answering questions). And the impressions or appearances that one ‘approves’ in this way will be the persuasive ones; the closing reference to impressions that ‘are not impeded by anything’ surely harks back to the process of testing persuasive appearances for mutual consistency—Sextus calls those that pass this test ‘unimpeded’ (aperispastos, M 7.176). There is still room for clarification as to what this distinction amounts to. Persuasive appearances, to recall, are those that strike one as true, or, to put it another way, that one regards as likely to be true. And the point must be that thinking of something as likely to be true is different from definitely committing oneself to its truth. The latter would be full-scale assent, which Carneades eschews. But thinking that something is likely is enough to stir one to action or to a particular response in a debate. So, as I said, Carneades has an orientation towards the truth—he cares about making his impressions of the world as likely as possible—but he nonetheless withholds final judgment on their truth. Since no amount of persuasiveness is a guarantee of truth, such a judgment, or assent of the full-scale variety, is never in order if one wants to avoid ‘opinion and rashness’. Instead, the thing to do is to go along with, or ‘approve’, what seems likely; in doing so, one commits oneself to no more than what looks as if it is true—never to what actually is true. One result of all this is that for Carneades, as for Sextus, philosophical thinking and everyday thinking are understood in essentially the same way. To repeat, the passage on assent versus ‘approval’ specifically mentions answering questions as one domain in which this distinction applies, and the questions could just as well be philosophical as quotidian; one can ‘approve’ a philosophical position without assenting to it in the full-scale fashion, just as one can ‘approve’ the impression that it is a sunny day, or that a trip to the beach would be fun. Now, as we saw, Cicero presents Carneades as making the claim that nothing can be apprehended, while also insisting that this itself was not apprehended (by himself or anyone else) (Acad. 2.28). We can now see how that could have worked: he can ‘approve’ the view that nothing can be apprehended without claiming to have apprehended it—or, in other words, without giving it fullscale assent. We can also see that, when Sextus differentiates himself from Carneades by saying 259

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that the latter asserts that nothing can be apprehended (PH 1.1–3), he is oversimplifying. Carneades does indeed say, in his own person, that nothing can be apprehended. But it is not something he assents to; it is merely something he finds persuasive, or thinks likely, and hence ‘approves’. The difference between them is real, but it is not as stark as Sextus makes out. As noted at the outset, Carneades talked about a great many philosophical topics: we have numerous reports of arguments he advanced in all three of the major philosophical areas recognised in his time: logic, physics, and ethics. I do not suggest that in all these cases he held views of his own, in this non-committal fashion. It is clear that much of his philosophical activity was critical, directed to undermining the theories of his dogmatist opponents and producing a state of suspension of judgment about these theories. But there is no need to suppose that this is all he was interested in doing. This ‘purely dialectical’ interpretation has enjoyed some support in recent decades.13 But if one takes seriously the idea that one can ‘approve’ positions without assenting to them—as Carneades clearly did, whatever one thinks of the success of this move—then there is no reason to recoil from attributing views to him. We have seen that the view that nothing can be apprehended looks very much like a view held by Carneades. Which of the other things he said may have represented views of his own is less clear. Clitomachus is reported to have said that he could never get clear on what Carneades’ own views were (Cicero, Acad. 2.139). Of course, if the purely dialectical interpretation was correct, Carneades would have held (or at any rate, expressed) no views at all, and Clitomachus, his closest associate, would presumably have known this. So this report suggests that he did have at least some views. It also suggests that Carneades did not go out of his way to clarify which these were. However, the two accounts on which we have concentrated in this section—Carneades’ account of the persuasive impression, and his account of the difference between assent and approval—look like good candidates for being his own views. They are clearly intended to show how choice and action (including, again, the speech acts that figure in philosophical debate) are possible without assent—a point on which we know that he was pressed by his opponents. If they succeed, there is no reason for him not to adopt them himself—the accounts can be applied to themselves, showing how they can be accepted without being assented to—and very good reason for him to do so, given the argumentative context.

4 Sextus’ thinking versus other people’s thinking (philosophical or otherwise) I have concentrated on how Sextus and Carneades characterise their own thinking, both in philosophical and in everyday contexts (since in neither case is there a rigid divide between the two). But in Sextus’ case,14 there are further issues concerning how he conceives the thinking of others—both the thinking of non-sceptical philosophers and the thinking of ordinary people who are not philosophers (whether sceptical or dogmatic)—and whether or how these differ from his own thinking. In this final section, I take up these issues. There is a curious ambivalence in Sextus about whether to count scepticism as a philosophy. In the opening sentences of Outlines of Pyrrhonism, where, as we saw, he distinguishes scepticism from the claim to have discovered the truth and the claim that it cannot be discovered, he refers to these three orientations as ‘the highest-level [i.e., most general] philosophies’ (PH 1.4, cf.1.2). And shortly afterwards, introducing his plan for the work, he says that there is both a general and a specific account ‘of the sceptical philosophy’ (PH 1.5), and then lists, among the topics to be considered under the general heading, the distinguishing of scepticism ‘from the neighbouring philosophies’, which certainly implies, even if it does not actually state, that scepticism is a philosophy. However, Sextus immediately goes on to say that the specific 260

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account is where the sceptics ‘argue against each part of what is called philosophy’ (PH 1.6), which seems to express a rather different attitude. And this phrase ‘what is called philosophy’ (hê kaloumenê philosophia or hê legomenê philosophia) occurs in numerous other places, especially in programmatic contexts. Often, as in the case just cited, the topic is one or more of the three parts of philosophy as the subject was standardly divided—logic, physics and ethics (PH 1.18, 2.205. 3.1). Sometimes the ‘called’ (or perhaps we should say, ‘so-called’) is applied to the parts themselves (PH 3.167); and at the end of the work, summing up his treatment of ethics, he even combines the two, speaking of ‘what is referred to as [tôi legomenôi] the ethical part of what is called [tês kaloumenês] philosophy’ (PH 3.278). The idea behind this phrasing seems to be that the enterprise generally conducted under the heading ‘philosophy’ has something suspect or bogus about it. It also implies, of course, that the sceptic wants nothing to do with this enterprise. The suspect element, I take it, is the pretension, on occasion at any rate, to have discovered the truth, or at least the optimistic expectation that this will sometimes happen.15 Speaking of the transition the sceptic has undergone from someone who hoped to discover the truth to someone who suspends judgment (in other words, from pre-sceptic to actual sceptic), Sextus characterises this person as ‘having begun to philosophise with a view to making a judgment on the appearances and apprehending which are true and which false’ (PH 1.26); this is clearly what he thinks nonsceptical philosophers are still aiming to do, and the confident aspiration to achieve this is presumably what he takes to be embodied in the term ‘philosophy’ as normally used. For a word whose etymology is ‘love of wisdom’, this is perhaps not unreasonable. Yet despite his obvious distancing of himself from philosophy so understood, he does not abandon the use of the term ‘philosophy’ for his own outlook once the phrase ‘so-called philosophy’ has been introduced. Having given his brief introduction to the sceptical ‘ability’, which we looked at earlier, he says that the ‘Pyrrhonian philosopher’ is one who has that ability (PH 1.11). And in the passage where he addresses the challenge from the dogmatists as to how a sceptic can even discuss their theories, he again speaks of ‘the sceptical philosophy’ (PH 2.6—also ‘the suspensive philosophy’, 2.9); yet immediately before and after this discussion, he also refers to the parts of ‘what is called philosophy’ (PH 2.1, 12). Of course, one possible explanation of this would be that Sextus thinks scepticism is a truer form of philosophy than the varieties of thought typically known by that term; someone who thought this might indeed refer to scepticism without qualification as ‘philosophy’ and the others as ‘so-called philosophy’.16 But there are at least two reasons why I think this is unlikely. First, Sextus gives absolutely no hint that he takes the term as applied to scepticism to be more appropriate than as applied to the other ways of thinking usually called philosophy. He repeatedly refers to the latter as ‘so-called philosophy’, but he never specifies something else that qualifies as bona fide philosophy. Moreover, when he does use the term ‘philosophy’ to apply to scepticism, phrases such as ‘the sceptical philosophy’ strongly suggest that there are other forms of thinking that could equally well be called philosophy; here, too, there is simply no contrast drawn that would limit the appropriate use of the term to scepticism. Second, to hold this kind of view would require that one had some kind of general conception of what it would take for a form of thinking to be legitimately termed a philosophy; and this does not sound at all like Sextus, both because it would saddle him with a positive doctrine, and because he explicitly says that the sceptic does not make a fuss about correct or incorrect uses of language (PH 1.207). But if we do not accept this attempted resolution of the issue, it follows that Sextus is inconsistent in his use of the term ‘philosophy’. Sometimes he applies it neutrally to scepticism and to dogmatic philosophies, while at other times he applies it pejoratively to dogmatic philosophies, with the clear implication that they do not live up to their pretentions in claiming 261

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the term, and that he himself wants nothing to do with philosophy so understood—but without offering any contrasting conception of philosophy that he would claim for himself. And since these distinct usages occur several times in very close proximity to one another, we can hardly doubt that he knows what he is doing.17 So what is that? Clearly any answer can only be guesswork. But I would like to suggest that Sextus is deliberately inviting us to reflect on what philosophical thinking is or could be. What is normally called philosophical thinking is an attempt to penetrate to the truth about the world, an attempt claimed by its proponents to have some success; in this usual understanding of the term, Sextus would not want to call himself a philosopher, and indeed he regards philosophy so understood as something of a sham. The kind of thinking in which he himself engages, when confronting the theories of these ‘philosophers’ who do not live up to their billing—the thinking that we discussed in the earlier section on Sextus—will then be something other than philosophical thinking. But then, one might say that, in Sextus’ view, the thinking of his opponents will not truly be philosophical thinking either, precisely because it fails to live up to what is claimed for it; if one follows out the implications of the term ‘so-called philosophy’ far enough, there will simply be no such thing as genuine philosophical thinking. On the other hand, on a more relaxed usage, sceptical thinking as we saw it in the earlier section will qualify as philosophical—and so will the thinking of his opponents; philosophical thinking will be any kind of thinking that addresses certain characteristic topics, and the thinking of sceptics and of dogmatists will qualify equally well. By juxtaposing these two different usages, Sextus is perhaps engaging in a kind of meta-level instance of his usual method of opposition, giving us two conflicting conceptions of philosophy, each having something to be said for it. Perhaps he is even pushing us to suspend judgment about what philosophy is and whether scepticism is a philosophy. At any rate, he is pushing us to consider that question. Finally, there is an issue that I have postponed concerning the relation between the thinking of the sceptic, whether in philosophical or in ordinary contexts, and the thinking of ordinary people. Here too Sextus seems to show ambivalence, and in this case I am not sure we can avoid seeing the inconsistency as a problem. As we saw, his account of how the sceptic acts by following the appearances seems to go out of its way to make the sceptic’s everyday activities look like those of the average person; and this may give the impression that he takes the average person’s attitudes not to involve anything that would conflict with his own sceptical suspension of judgment. But this is not the case. In the very next chapter of Outlines of Pyrrhonism, where he talks about the sceptic’s aim in life (PH 1.25–30), he singles out the main reason for the sceptic’s tranquillity: it is the fact that the sceptic lacks any beliefs to the effect that certain things are really, in their true nature, good or bad. For this reason, he suggests, the sceptic is better off than other people. And among these ‘other people’ are not just dogmatic philosophers, for whom a belief in things that are really good and bad would be a central aspect of their ethical thinking, but also ordinary people (idiôtai, PH 1.30). At least on this subject, then, Sextus attributes to the average person a set of beliefs about how things really are, beliefs from which he very explicitly separates himself. This apparently two-sided approach is replicated in other places. When he discusses signs—that is, means for inferring from something observed to something unobserved—Sextus distinguishes between signs as employed in common life and signs as employed by dogmatic philosophers. The former, which he calls commemorative signs, are observed phenomena that allow one to infer to something else currently unobserved, because in the past the two types of thing have frequently been observed together—for example, smoke as a sign of fire, when one’s view of the fire happens to be blocked; one’s memory of the regular correlation of smoke and fire leads one to think ‘fire’ as soon as one 262

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sees smoke. By contrast, the signs the dogmatists employ—or claim to employ—are observed phenomena that supposedly allow inferences about things that can never be observed, such as the atomic structure of matter18; these Sextus calls ‘indicative signs’. Now, Sextus does not accept indicative signs, and offers numerous arguments against their existence to balance those of their proponents. But he has no problem with commemorative signs, saying that they are common in everyday life, and declaring that on this topic the sceptics actually take the side of ordinary life by agreeing with its methods and rejecting only the kind of sign dreamed up by the dogmatists (PH 2.97–102, M 8.151–58). Here, then, is another case where Sextus seems to emphasise that the average person’s attitudes are akin to his own. A further such case is religion, where he says that the sceptics ‘following ordinary life without opinions, say that there are gods and worship the gods and say that they have foreknowledge’, and oppose only dogmatic theories about the divine (PH 3.2, cf. M 9.49). But here things begin to get more complicated. For when Sextus moves to consider the real existence of god, and to suspend judgment about it, he includes among the views placed in opposition (about which judgment is therefore to be suspended) not only dogmatic theories, but also the views of ordinary people (M 9.50, PH 3.218–19). So now it sounds as if ordinary religion is not just a matter of practices one can engage in without endorsing any doctrines; rather, ordinary people hold the definite belief that there are gods, which is a belief about how things really are. And in this case, Sextus cannot pretend both to be a sceptic and to be religious in the way ordinary people are religious.19 In one work, Against the Physicists, he says both of these things about ordinary religion very close together, as if there was no conflict between them (M 9.49, 50); but it is hard to see how he can have it both ways.20 Another case where he includes an ordinary opinion among the opposing views on which to suspend judgment is motion. Some people say that there is motion, some say that there is not, and some suspend judgment about it. The sceptics are of course in the last category. But the attitude of ordinary life is placed in the first category (PH 3.65, M 10.45). Sextus does say that ordinary people rely on the appearances in making this judgment (M 10.45, cf. PH 3.66), and he too, as we have seen, relies on appearances. But since the ordinary judgment about motion is placed among the opposing positions on which judgment is suspended, it cannot be a mere following of opinion like the sceptic’s own; it must instead be the definite view that motion really is part of the nature of things. So it looks as if Sextus’ own everyday attitudes are not entirely the same as the attitudes he takes ordinary people to hold. On some subjects he attributes to ordinary people, implicitly or explicitly, opinions that we could call reflective or quasi-theoretical; even ordinary people, then, take on board a little of the kind of philosophical thinking that we have seen he studiously avoids, and stigmatises with the phrase ‘so-called philosophy’. While he periodically strikes the pose of being sympathetic to the average person and only opposed to the highfalutin philosophizing of the dogmatists, he does not stick with it consistently. There would be nothing wrong with this if he were simply to admit that even ordinary people are sometimes drawn towards speculation about the real nature of things, and that, to that extent, his own thinking (whether on philosophical topics or not) stands apart both from that of ordinary people and from that of dogmatic philosophers. But he never says anything along these lines, and one might wish that he had been clearer on the matter—both in his own head and in communicating with the reader. Again, the hardest case here is probably religion: if he going to place ordinary people, as he does, alongside dogmatic philosophers in their belief in gods, he is just not plausible when he says that he is religious in the same way as the ordinary person.

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Notes 1 Under this heading Sextus includes Carneades. As we shall see, this is not without merit, although it omits a crucial point. 2 This reading of Sextus is not uncontroversial. Casey Perin, in particular, has argued that Sextus is indeed an inquirer in the expected sense of someone trying to discover the truth; see Perin (2010). I have argued against this kind of reading in several essays in Bett (2019), although I am no longer as critical of Sextus’ self-description as inquirer as in some of those essays. A fine recent treatment of the topic is Castagnoli (2018). 3 Sextus elsewhere raises essentially the same issue concerning the specific topic of demonstration, attributing the objection to the Epicureans (M 8.337–36a); but his response here is less satisfactory. I have discussed this in Bett (forthcoming a: sec. 4). 4 A good recent discussion of this is Stojanovic (2019). 5 I read logôi, following most editors; Annas and Barnes (Sextus 2000) omit this word from their translation. I have discussed this in more detail in Bett (forthcoming a, n. 33). 6 Dogmatic versus sceptical conceptions of reason are well discussed in Tsouna (2019). The only major point on which I would take issue with Tsouna is that, on her reading, Sextus also adopts a second conception of reason that is closer to the dogmatic one; this seems to me unnecessary. 7 Historikôs, an adverb from the noun historia, which (among other things) can mean a medical report of observed symptoms; the term is so used especially by the Empiricist school of medicine, with which Sextus Empiricus was of course associated (See Galen, On the Sects for Beginners [Galen 1985: chap.2], where historia is translated ‘history’). 8 For this reason, Carneades has sometimes been thought of as a kind of coherentist. 9 Sextus’ briefer account of these matters in Outlines of Pyrrhonism reverses the order of these two higher levels of persuasiveness: first checking, then looking at consistency. But since there will surely be considerable overlap between these two, not much turns on this. For discussion, see Allen (1994). 10 In Bett (1989) I argued for a reading of Carneades similar to what I have here attributed to Sextus. This now seems to me not to have given enough attention to the connection (both in Sextus’ summary of Carneades and as a conceptual matter) between persuasiveness and truth. On this, see Thorsrud (2010, 2018). However, I think I am still at odds with Thorsrud in that I see Carneades as restricting himself to subjective impressions of truth, rather than any kind of objective judgment that something is true. On this, see further Bett (forthcoming b). 11 These words could also be translated ‘that he doesn’t assent to anything at all’. Either way, the point is that one will refrain from assent of the strong kind, by comparison with the other kind that is about to be introduced. For more detailed discussion, see Bett (forthcoming b: sec. III). 12 Probabilitatem; probabilis is Cicero’s translation of pithanos, which I have rendered as ‘persuasive’. 13 An important impetus for this was Couissin (1929), made widely available to Anglophone readers in the influential Burnyeat (1983). Sedley (1983), in the same volume, also supports it. 14 Nothing comparable is recorded for Carneades. 15 Elsewhere Sextus speaks of ‘all the philosophical schools and scepticism’, as if scepticism is not a philosophical school (PH 1.185). The emphasis here may be on ‘school’ (hairesis) more than on ‘philosophical’. But since Sextus also says that, if by ‘school’ you mean a set of doctrines about the underlying nature of things, the sceptic does not belong to a school (PH 1.16), his point here will amount to essentially the same thing. 16 Annas and Barnes (Sextus 2000) use the translation ‘what they call philosophy’; whether or not they intended it, this could be understood to imply such a reading (with ‘what they call philosophy’ being contrasted with something else that Sextus himself calls philosophy). However, there is no ‘they’ in the Greek. 17 What I have been saying in this section applies almost exclusively to Outlines of Pyrrhonism. Sextus’ other works do not exhibit this phenomenon to anything like the same extent. On this, see Bett (2013: sec. IV). 18 Today the distinction between what is or can be observed, and what is not or cannot, is of course much less clear than Sextus assumes. Are the results obtained at the Large Hadron Collider, for example, observations or inferences? But in an era of primitive technology and very limited grasp of experimental techniques, the idea that we can sharply distinguish between what can (in the right circumstances) be observed, and what is permanently and by nature unobservable, must have seemed much more obvious.

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Thinking without commitment 19 I have discussed this in detail in Bett (2015). Marchand (2016) is an interesting defense of Sextus, attributing to him a pragmatic attitude towards religious discourse while accepting that ordinary people may well have religious beliefs that go beyond this. I do not see how this avoids Sextus being disingenuous when he claims to be ‘following ordinary life’ concerning religion. However, we agree on my main point in this context: that Sextus does not take his own attitudes to be fully in line with those of ordinary people. 20 Why not say that this is a case where Sextus is going ‘meta’ and inviting the reader to ponder the question—as I did in the case of scepticism and philosophy? Because the question at issue here is simply whether people have the definite belief that there really are gods; and what people believe is not the kind of issue on which he applies the method of opposition—indeed, he seems in general to treat this as easy to answer, presumably at the level of appearances. By contrast, the question what counts as a philosophy clearly belongs in the theoretical domain and admits of opposing views.

References Allen, J. (1994) Academic Probabilism and Stoic Epistemology, Classical Quarterly 44: 85–113. Bett, R. (1989) Carneades’ Pithanon: A Reappraisal of Its Role and Status, Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 7: 59–94. Bett, R. (2013) The Pyrrhonist’s Dilemma: What to Write If You Have Nothing to Say, in M. Erler and J.-E. Hessler (eds.), Argument und Literarischer Form in antiker Philosophie, Berlin: De Gruyter, 389–410. Bett, R. (2015) God: M 9.13-194, in K. Algra and K. Ierodiakonou (eds.), Sextus Empiricus and Ancient Physics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 33–73. Bett, R. (2019) How to be a Pyrrhonist: The Practice and Significance of Pyrrhonian Skepticism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bett (forthcoming a) Doing Things with Concepts in Sextus Empiricus, in G. Betegh and V. Tsouna (eds.), The Notion of Concept in Greek Philosophy, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bett (forthcoming b) The Stoics and Carneades: Dialectic and the Holding of Views, in J. Klein and N. Powers (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Hellenistic Philosophy, New York: Oxford University Press. Burnyeat, M. (ed.) (1983) The Skeptical Tradition, Berkeley: University of California Press. Castagnoli, L. (2018) Aporia and Enquiry in Ancient Pyrrhonism, in G. Karamanolis and V. Politis (eds.), The Aporetic Tradition in Ancient Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 205–227. Couissin, P. (1929) Le Stoïcisme de la Nouvelle Académie, Revue d’histoire de la philosophie 3: 241–276. Galen (1985) Three Treatises on the Nature of Science, (trans.) M. Frede, Indianapolis: Hackett. Marchand, S. (2016) Religion et piété sceptiques selon Sextus Empiricus, in A.-I. Bouton-Touboulic and C. Lévy (eds.), Scepticisme et religion: constantes et évolutions de la philosophie hellénistique à la philosophie médiévale, Turnhout: Brepols, 103–117. Perin, C. (2010) The Demands of Reason: An Essay on Pyrrhonian Scepticism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sedley, D. (1983) The Motivation of Greek Skepticism, in M. Burnyeat (ed.), The Skeptical Tradition, Berkeley: University of California Press, 9–29. Sextus Empiricus (2000) Outlines of Scepticism, 2nd ed., (eds. and trans.) J. Annas and J. Barnes, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stojanovic, P. (2019) Zeno of Citium’s Causal Theory of Apprehensive Appearances, Ancient Philosophy 39: 151–174. Thorsrud, H. (2010) Arcesilaus and Carneades, in R. Bett (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Scepticism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 58–80. Thorsrud, H. (2018) Carneades, in D. Machuca and B. Reed (eds.), Skepticism: From Antiquity to the Present, London: Bloomsbury, 51–66. Tsouna, V. (2019) Le scepticisme pyrrhonien et le concept de raison, in D. Machuca and S. Marchand (eds.), Les raison du soute: Études sur le scepticisme antique, Paris: Classique Garnier, 91–125.

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19 THINKING, ACTING, AND ACTING BY THINKING Marx and Althusser Gregor Moder

1 Introduction ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it’ (Marx and Engels, 1976: 8). This famous sentence written by Karl Marx and edited slightly by Friedrich Engels is known as the Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach, and is perhaps the most concise philosophical formulation of the critique of philosophy, of philosophical thinking as such. Published posthumously by Engels, the Theses on Feuerbach soon circulated as a kind of condensation of Marx’s thought in bullet points. The final thesis—the one to rule them all, so to speak—Thesis Eleven, became perhaps the most widely known line in all Marx. In 1953, it was inscribed in the entrance to the Humboldt University in East Berlin, becoming a symbol of what one must learn when one first enters the universe of knowledge. It was also used as an epitaph on Marx’s tombstone in London (together with ‘Workers of all Lands, Unite’), thus gaining the status, we could say, of not only the entry-point to Marx’s thought, but also of its ultimate wisdom.1 Unsurprisingly, these words have been at the centre of incessant controversies, many within Marxism itself. It seems fairly clear that they call for a revolutionary action and further argue that such action cannot be achieved with the means of philosophy alone. However, it is much less clear how exactly we should think the relationship between interpretation and change. Does this alternative imply a very crude materialist distinction between thinking and action, between theory and practice? Is interpretation not an action in its own right? And, conversely, is change always revolutionary? Étienne Balibar admits quite frankly that ‘the statement in question is rather paradoxical’ (2007: 17). Slavoj Žižek has consistently criticized Marx on this point, and even called for an inversion of the thesis: ‘One is therefore tempted to turn around Marx’s thesis 11: the first task today is precisely NOT to succumb to the temptation to act, to directly intervene and change things […], but to question the hegemonic ideological coordinates. If, today, one follows a direct call to act, this act will not be performed in an empty space—it will be an act WITHIN the hegemonic ideological coordinates’ (Žižek 2001). For Louis Althusser, the Theses on Feuerbach, together with the text of The German Ideology, constituted an ‘epistemological break’ in Marx’s oeuvre, leaving the philosophical, ideological, humanist, Feuerbachian, Hegelian young Marx behind, and heralding the work of Marx the scientist. As Althusser argued, the reason for the ambiguity of the Theses lies precisely in the fact that they were written in a precarious moment 266

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when Marx already recognized the inadequacy of the ideological (philosophical) concepts at his disposal, but has not yet developed his own scientific concepts: The Theses on Feuerbach, which are only a few sentences long, mark out the earlier limit of this break [the epistemological break], the point at which the new theoretical consciousness is already beginning to show through in the erstwhile consciousness and the erstwhile language, that is, as necessarily ambiguous and unbalanced concepts. (Althusser 2005: 33) Judging by the uneasiness with which Thesis Eleven is approached even today, it seems fair to say that it is just as politically provocative and effective as it is philosophically imprecise and even paradoxical. Does this fact confirm what the thesis itself claims, namely that there is an irreducible alternative between political action (to change the world) and philosophical thinking (to interpret the world)? Balibar provides a convincing explanation as to why Thesis Eleven continues to stir up philosophical interest: It was not by chance that this formula coined by Marx […] acquired its philosophical renown. If we search our memories a little, we can very soon find a profound kinship […] with some equally lapidary, philosophical propositions, which are traditionally considered ‘fundamental’ and which take the form, at times, of tautologies and, at others, of antitheses. All these formulations, different in content or opposed in intent as they may be, share a common concern with the question of the relation between theory and practice, consciousness and life. This is true from Parmenides’s ‘Thinking and being are one’ to Wittgenstein’s ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent’, via Spinoza (‘God is nature’), Kant (‘I have therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge, in order to make room for faith’), and Hegel (‘The rational is real and the real is rational’). And here is Marx ensconced not just at the heart of philosophy, but at the heart of its most speculative turn, in which it strives to think its own limits, whether to abolish them or to establish itself on the basis of a recognition of those limits. (2007: 19) If Thesis Eleven is so philosophically provocative, it is because it directly addresses a central philosophical question of the relationship between thinking and acting, theory and practice, consciousness and life. Now, Balibar warns us that we should not reduce the thesis to a case of some profound wisdom, thus mystifying the very problem which Marx addresses and attempts to elucidate in the Theses and in The German Ideology (2007: 19). Instead, this chapter is an attempt to uncover and unpack the Marxist concept of thinking.

2 Phantoms formed in the brains of men We begin by examining closer Marx’s project in The German Ideology. The central term which determines the relationship between theory and practice is already given in the title: ideology. We will leave the adjective ‘German’ aside for the time being, only to return to it later. What is ideology and what kind of problem is addressed with this term? One way to look at this is to say that the question Marx is interested in is that of the origin of ideas. This question is a materialist question almost by definition. For philosophical idealism, this kind of question never occurs, because its question is inverse: idealism asks the question of 267

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the origin of material reality. Marx’s ‘materialist method’, as he calls it, consists not of asking how is it that trees, houses and men exist, nor does it find the answer in ideas or ideals which generate reality through a process of emanation or effluence, such as we can find in Plotinus, but quite on the contrary, it sets out from the fact that humans live, and that nature exists, and asks where ideas come from. Marx’s general claim is that the ideas of a given human society originate from the practice, the actions and the organization of that society. The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men—the language of real life. Conceiving, thinking, the mental intercourse of men at this stage still appear as the direct efflux [direkter Ausfluß] of their material behaviour [materielle Tätigkeit]. (Marx and Engels, 1976: 5:36; 1978: 26) The claim is clear: ideas originate in the material practice of the society in question. The formulation which immediately catches our attention is the claim that thinking is the direct efflux (direkter Ausfluß) of the material behaviour (materielle Tätigkeit) of men. What is fascinating in this formulation is that it very clearly evokes the vocabulary of Plotinus. Just as for Plotinus, material reality was an efflux (or emanation) of ideas, and ultimately of the Divine One beyond being and thought, Marx and Engels explicitly understand ideas and conceptions as, in the ultimate analysis, emanations from human material life, from ‘the language of real life’. The authors immediately add: ‘The same applies to mental production as expressed in the language of politics, laws, morality, religion, metaphysics, etc., of a people’ (Marx and Engels, 1976: 5:36; 1978: 26). So just as the individual ideas and concepts held by men emanate from their living practices, so does the overall mental production of a given society (‘of a people’)—as it is expressed in its laws, morality and politics—emanate from the material, living or real practice of that society. And to make the comparison with the metaphysical-theological edifice of Neoplatonism even more vivid, Marx and Engels write: ‘In direct contrast to German philosophy which descends from heaven to earth, here it is a matter of ascending from earth to heaven’ (Marx and Engels, 1976: 5:36; 1978: 26). The visual metaphor employed here, that of the downward or upward movement, is extremely clear, and it is precisely because it is so clear that it is also problematic. The passing reference to Neoplatonic metaphysics and theology is far from innocent. First of all, what Marx and Engels appear to criticize is the very Neoplatonic concept of generation where one proceeds by descending down to earth; what they seem to suggest, instead, is an inversion of the process of generation, an ascension from earth to heaven. But what Marx and Engels apparently still adhere to and still consider valid is the metaphysical process of generation as emanation or effluence itself. This is, in principle, the reason why Louis Althusser later quipped that ‘The German Ideology does offer us, after the 1844 Manuscripts, an explicit theory of ideology, but – it is not Marxist’ (1971: 158). According to Althusser, a proper theory of ideology would require more than just a simple inversion of the direction of the process of generation (down instead of up); what is required is a completely different concept of generation as such.2 Second, the reference to Neoplatonism which Marx and Engels make in passing is employed to describe a philosophical system which was very much alive and present in German academia at the time, and one which profoundly informed not only Ludwig Feuerbach, whose name appears as the title to the first part of The German Ideology, but also the young Marx himself—namely, the Hegelian philosophical system. It is the Hegelian philosophical system and its Feuerbachian repackaging which, as Marx and Engels argue, amounts to nothing but a modern version of a Neoplatonic system of emanation, where one descends from heaven to 268

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earth. What is therefore at stake for Marx and Engels is an inversion of the Hegelian dialectic itself. Marx explicitly states this in his 1873 afterword to the second German edition of Capital, where he once again evokes the terminology of the ancients: My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite. To Hegel, the life process of the human brain, i. e., the process of thinking, which, under the name of ‘the Idea’, he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurgos of the real world, and the real world is only the external, phenomenal form of ‘the Idea’. With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought. (Marx and Engels, 1976: 35:19) Even though he appears to clearly distance himself from Hegel, Marx immediately acknowledges that he ‘coquettes’ with the Hegelian dialectic and that one has to separate the ‘rational kernel’ from the ‘mystic shell’ of the dialectic in order to turn it ‘right side up again’ (Marx and Engels, 1976: 35:19). However, this makes the whole matter of inversion of the dialectic even more complicated. If Marx’s dialectic is to be considered a ‘direct opposite’ to the Hegelian dialectic, does this mean that the material world plays the role which must, in the ultimate analysis, be that of the demiurgos? Althusser, in particular, expresses disappointment at the ambiguities of Marx’s own account of his analytic procedures in Capital, and argues that the only sensible way to understand what Marx calls the reversal of Hegelian dialectic is to understand it as a complete and radical change of terrain and transformation of the problematic. In other words, Marx was himself quite unaware of the full conceptual implication of his radical theoretical shift. But the task of this chapter is to trace Marx’s concept of thinking, so let us first take another look at what Marx and Engels write in The German Ideology on the topic of how thoughts are produced. They argue that their method consists in setting out from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life-process demonstrating the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life-process. The phantoms formed in the brains of men are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life-process, which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises. Morality, religion, metaphysics, and all the rest of ideology as well as the forms of consciousness corresponding to these, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence. They have no history, no development; but men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this their actual world, also their thinking and the products of their thinking. It is not consciousness that determines life, but life that determines consciousness. (1976: 5:36–7) Morality, religion, metaphysics and the rest of ideology are without history, because it is only ‘real, active’ men that alter by developing their material production and their relations, and only along with this alteration, as a kind of a side effect, there also comes a change in ideology. In short, consciousness and ideas are nothing but an epiphenomenon of the material practices and material organization of human life. They are nothing but mere ‘reflexes’, ‘echoes’ or ‘phantoms formed in the brains of men’. This corresponds perfectly to the phrase used in the afterword to second German edition of Capital, according to which ‘the ideal is nothing else

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than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought’ (Marx and Engels, 1976: 35:19, my emphasis). If human consciousness is but an echo or reflexion or translation of physical, material reality, and thoughts are but phantoms formed in our brains, then the infamous Thesis Eleven, emphasizing action rather than interpretation, is a perfectly adequate condensation of a good portion of The German Ideology. In certain areas of philosophy of mind it is still fashionable to ask oneself: ‘How do I know that I am not a zombie?’—which is more or less to say: ‘How can we know that we are not Cartesian automata, perfectly functioning without any use of mind or consciousness?’ In its first approximation, it would seem that Marx’s answer to this question would be: ‘Well, funny you should ask, because we are zombies, we are automata, and our consciousness is purely a reflexion of our material actions, a phantom formed in our zombie brains’. But do Marx and Engels truly argue for a radical heteronomy of all thought and consciousness? Judging from the phrases referenced here—reflexion, echo, translation, phantoms—it may very well seem so. However, this impression vanishes when we take account of one further point they add, a point about the social classes: The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. […] The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relations, the dominant material relations grasped as ideas; hence of the relations which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance. (1976: 5:59) Any given historical society therefore has various and quite divergent ideas, and not all of them necessarily correspond to the material practices of that society, not all of them are fully determined by those practices. Marx and Engels argue for a somewhat milder version of the heteronomy of thought: the dominant material relationships in a given society determine the dominant ideology of that society, to the extent that the dominant ideology is ‘the dominant material relationship grasped as ideas’. It remains unclear, however, what reality, if any, one should ascribe to ideas which do not reflect the dominant material relationships. And of course, most importantly: what is the reality of Marxist ideas themselves? How does Marx think Marx? What is a Marxist understanding of Marxist ideas themselves? The philosophical problem here is that Marxist ideas, if we take them to articulate, in thoughts, the basis of a potential future form of human society, clearly do not reflect the dominant material reality of their own time, nor indeed of any other time in human history. At most, it could be argued that they are formulated from the perspective of communism, a social construction which is, as the famous Radio Erevan joke goes, always ‘on the horizon’, always postponed to an indefinite future. Do Marx’s ideas speak to us as if from the future, from the future in which the world has finally embraced communism? Should one, in order to be a Marxist, strictly speaking adopt a post finem perspective, a perspective of the end of history and time itself? The question posed here may seem strange, but it is not an easy one to answer, and it would be a mistake to think that it is a problem only for Marxism. It is a problem for any philosophical enterprise which attempts to account for a historical transformation of human societies, but rejects the notion that such change comes through imagination or abstract ideas of particular individuals; in other words, it is a problem for any historical materialism. One can, as Spinoza did, adopt a radical materialist position but reject the notion of history; or one can, as Hegel supposedly did, adopt an idealist approach to history. The point, however, is that Marx’s position can be reduced to neither. A historical materialism must think something like an intervention of the material plane on that 270

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material plane itself, a kind of a short-circuit, or a torsion. In Althusser’s epistemology, we can identify two ways of articulating this intervention—as ‘symptomatic reading’ and as ‘the difference between the real object and the object of knowledge’.

3 The science of Marx: symptomatic reading and intervention in the real We are trying to determine what is thinking for Marx and we have now formulated this question in the following way: what is the exact status of Marxist analysis itself within the framework of the relationship of determination between material reality and ideology? It is clearly not the material reality itself, but it is also not simply an echo of material reality. So, what is it? Our question, to be sure, is a philosophical one. In this sense, what we are really asking could also be simply phrased as: what is the philosophy of Marx? This is precisely the question which haunted Althusser throughout his body of work. His answer was, in principle, the claim that Marx did not have an operational concept of Marxist philosophy, and that Marx’s central work, Capital, should not be understood as a work of philosophy at all, but rather as a work of science. One should immediately note that the term ‘science’ here does not imply the experimental method of the natural sciences. In fact, Althusser argues that Marx inaugurated a new scientific field, the science of history; it is clear, therefore, that the procedures of scientific rigour must differ completely from those of the natural sciences, though in Althusser’s account they also differ—as we shall soon see—from what we usually understand as the work of historians. The reason why Althusser operates with the term ‘science’ is extremely interesting for our purpose in this chapter: Althusser argues that Marx, in the act of thinking the relationship between the dominant economic practice and the dominant ideology, is clearly not performing an act of an economic or political practice, but he is also not simply reproducing a thought within the dominant ideology of his time; instead, Marx’s thought has to be seen as an intervention into the dominant ideological status quo. In other words, what Althusser proposes is to situate the radical split evoked in Marx’s Thesis Eleven not between thinking and acting, between consciousness and life, between theory and practice, but within thought itself. The terms of Thesis Eleven—interpretation and change—thus morph into terms of thought itself. There is thought and then there is thought, or, more specifically there are two practices of thought, two kinds of ‘theoretical practice’. Althusser writes: By theory, in this respect, I shall mean a specific form of practice, itself belonging to the complex unity of the ‘social practice’ of a determinate human society. Theoretical practice falls within the general definition of practice. […] In its most general form theoretical practice does not only include scientific theoretical practice, but also prescientific theoretical practice, that is, ‘ideological’ theoretical practice (the forms of ‘knowledge’ that make up the prehistory of a science, and their ‘philosophies’). The theoretical practice of a science is always completely distinct from the ideological theoretical practice of its prehistory: this distinction takes the form of a ‘qualitative’ theoretical and historical discontinuity which I shall follow Bachelard in calling an ‘epistemological break’. (2005: 167–68) We cannot delve too deep into the specifics of Althusser’s classification. For the purposes of this chapter, however, it is still imperative to note that the radical break or discontinuity between 271

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science and ideology should not be construed as a separation between, say, those who are in the know and those who are deceived, or between those who think freely and autonomously and those who blindly follow the mainstream. If Althusser argues that ideology constitutes something like a ‘prehistory’ of the science itself, then we could argue that the relationship between science and ideology is strictly speaking a historical one. This explains why Althusser discusses the relationship between ideology and science in the case of Marx himself: up to a certain point, Marx was thinking only within the limits of the dominant theoretical practice of his time, which is to say, within the limits of Hegelianism as the German ideology. At some crucial point, however, Marx was able to produce scientific work, an intervention into the dominant status quo of theoretical practice. But—and this is extremely important—such an intervention did not come from an ‘outside’ of ideology, but should rather be seen as an outburst from within ideological theoretical practice itself. The relationship between science and ideology is therefore a historical one in the precise sense that, while scientific and ideological accounts of the world may very well coexist (and in fact they do), the intervention of science presupposes the existence of ideology as the dominant ideology of the old, past regime. But even if we accept what Althusser insisted on—namely that Marxism inaugurates the science of history as, ultimately, the history of the class struggle—why should we not simply call this theoretical field ‘the philosophy of history’? Why does Althusser insist on the term ‘the science of history’? In part, of course, the answer lies in the fact that, in the Preface to the second volume of Capital, Engels had already presented Marx’s work as scientific and compared Marx’s analysis of the surplus value to a ‘thunderbolt out of a clear sky’ and to the achievements in modern chemistry (1976: 36:18–19). Althusser’s insistence on the term science, at the same time, serves another very precise theoretical purpose. Let us recall once again the injunction of the infamous Thesis Eleven: the philosophers have only ever interpreted the world, and the point is to change it. By providing the framework in which we would be allowed to understand Marx’s Capital as the work of science rather than as ( just another) work of philosophy, Althusser can claim that Marx’s work is not only an interpretation of the world, but already implies the change of the world.3 Let me rephrase this point, one more time, as it is central to this chapter. Our problem is the problem of the nature of Marxist thought as opposed to Marxist revolutionary political practice. If it is true, as Marx himself insists, that the sphere of ideology, and especially of philosophy, is an emanation, ‘a direct efflux’ of the sphere of the relations between ‘real men’, then what exactly is this third thing which is neither the real world as such nor a mere reflection of it (a mere philosophical interpretation)? Clearly, it must fulfil two seemingly paradoxical conditions: first of all, it must be a form of thought, but secondly, it must immediately appear on the level of practice itself. Althusser’s solution to this paradox is, first, to relocate the split and place it within the domain of thought as such—the domain which he calls ‘theoretical practice’—and secondly, to distinguish the two kinds of theoretical practice, scientific and ideological, as historical and pre-historical. Or, if we try to formulate this point by paraphrasing Thesis Eleven: philosophies only reflect the real world, science, however, historically intervenes in it. Let us look at the specific scientific procedures that Marx used according to Althusser, the procedures which allowed him to produce what I call an historical intervention, but which could be phrased more precisely in Althusserian terms as an intervention which produces a historical shift. On this point, we must turn to the volume called Reading Capital which Althusser published with Balibar and others and which, perhaps surprisingly, situates the scientific procedure of Marx in terms of the practice of reading. He calls it, with a clear reference to Freud and Lacan, the procedure of symptomatic reading. Discussing a lengthy paragraph where Marx distinguishes between the value of labour and the value of labour power, Althusser argues that Marx did not 272

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simply add his own concept to the list of concepts already present in the classics and discussed by them. Instead, Althusser argues that Marx recorded a detailed protocol of reading of the classics where it becomes clear that the mistake of the classics lies not simply in the fact that they do not have the concepts which Marx has, because in a certain sense—they do have them! They do have them and yet they do not know that they have them. What Marx did was to register this ‘presence in the form of absence’ of the concept of the value of labour power. Thus Marx makes us see blanks in the text of classical economics’ answer; but that is merely to make us see what the classical text itself says while not saying it, does not say while saying it. Hence it is not Marx who says what the classical text does not say, it is not Marx who intervenes to impose from without on the classical text a discourse which reveals its silence—it is the classical text itself which tells us that it is silent: its silence is its own words. (Althusser 1970: 22) What Althusser calls a theoretical symptom in this case is the presence of an answer, in the text Marx is reading, which is the correct answer, and yet ‘it is the correct answer to a question that has just one failing: it was never posed’ (1970: 22). In other words, the proper procedure of science is therefore to articulate the (correct) question on the basis of the superfluous answer—this retroactive step, producing the future text from within the text read, is the very task of such symptomatic reading. Robert J. C. Young comments: The symptomatic reading, therefore, is not at all a Freudian reading in which symptoms are traced back to their explanatory cause, but a translation of the text forward into the terms of the new concepts toward which it was working. Althusser in Reading Capital seeks to retrieve another method of reading that is Marx’s own. (2017: 47) Young’s understanding of the concept is interesting insofar as it seems to invoke the notion of a future text intervening into the present text (‘translation forward’); however, the precise relation to the psychoanalytic concept of the symptom is more complex than Young suggests. After all, a cause in psychoanalysis should not be considered as ‘explanatory’, and one could perhaps even argue that the basic psychoanalytic procedure with regard to symptoms is not to ‘trace them back’ in an attempt to explain them (this has no use value to the patient, his or her symptoms do not dissipate once they are ‘explained’)—even though in early formulations Freud may seem to suggest this—but rather to rewrite or translate the text in which they appear as symptoms in the first place. As Samo Tomšič insists, Marx and psychoanalysis share the notion of the symptom which should not be understood as a medical symptom, as a sign pointing to a cause outside of, or beneath, the texture upon which it appears as a symptom. Rather, Tomšič emphasizes that Jacques Lacan, who famously argued for a return to Freud, even explicitly praised Marx as the one who ‘invented’ the concept of the symptom distinct from the medical symptom. He writes: Discussions of psychoanalysis often mention that Freud’s invention consisted in the fact that he listened to the speech of his hysteric patients, who revealed to him the secret of the unconscious: the hysteric symptom speaks and by speaking enunciates the truth of the discourse that determines it. This enunciation already inhibits the mechanism of satisfaction. In this, psychoanalysis most directly coincides with Marx’s discovery that in labour, too, an enunciation takes place, which articulates the truth of the capitalist 273

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relations of production. This is where Marx’s invention of the social symptom gains its full weight for psychoanalysis. The symptom is the encounter of the proletarian and the subject of the unconscious, of the labourer and the speaking being. (Tomšič 2015: 117) We can surmise, then, that Althusser’s ‘symptomatic reading’, inasmuch as it refers the text it is reading to another text, to a text which is only present in the apparent absences of the first text, already encapsulates the matrix of structuralist and psychoanalytic interventions into Marxism. The fact that symptomatic reading is a ‘translation forward’, that it produces rather than explains, is precisely what makes it cognate with the psychoanalytic understanding of the symptom. But what is the relationship between the text of theory and the real world? Another, and related, important epistemological point for Althusser is that the object of knowledge should never be confused with the real object. To an extent, this point is already implied in the Theses on Feuerbach and The German Ideology: it would be a mistake to assume that philosophy can produce a change in the real world with the means of philosophy alone. As Althusser insisted, a theoretical practice cannot reach out from the domain of theoretical practice, and its products are theoretical products themselves. But if this is the case, then how does one intervene in the real world? Does the strict separation between the object of knowledge and the real object throw us back to square one, to the strict and reductive separation between impotent philosophical thinking and revolutionary political action? Alain Badiou compares Althusser’s separation of cognition and the real to Spinoza’s metaphysics where the attribute of thought cannot intervene in the attribute of extension. However, Spinoza’s system has an interesting provision, namely that ‘[t]he order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things’ (Spinoza 2002: 247; E2P7). This means that, for Spinoza, there is no problem of an intervention into the real such as Marx and Althusser require. Badiou writes with regard to Spinoza’s doctrine of ordo et connexio: ‘Ideas, thinking, and things fall under the same law, under the same order. […] So there is no real problem of the relationship between the idea and the thing: the idea and the thing are in the same general order’ (2017: 32). This solution cannot work for Althusser, and Badiou concludes that this makes Althusser’s epistemology a version of Kantianism: I insist that, for Spinoza, this problem does not exist … because there is in fact no relationship between the two [i.e., thought and extension], because they are of the same substance. But, for Althusser, the order is not the same, so there is in fact a real difficulty. And this difficulty, I am convinced, is in fact a Kantian difficulty. It is a difficulty, the solution of which is for Kant ‘schematism’. Schematism, in Kant, is precisely the mechanism by which the formal organization of the categories of knowledge are related to the external existence, which we cannot know, of the world. In Althusser, ‘theory’, theoretical nature, and so on, must be understood as a mixture of the immanent Spinozist vision of two attributes of the same real with this Kantian schematism. (2017: 33) In short, the real world remains utterly unknowable, and Badiou concludes that the exact process by which the object of knowledge appropriates the real (the real world) remains a mystery: ‘So there is a mystery, a final mystery, which is the final appropriation of the real object by the knowledge object that is a characteristic of scientific practice’ (2017: 33). Althusser’s account of the relationship between thinking and the real thus remains utterly 274

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incomplete, even ‘a mystery’. This means that the precise way of how science intervenes in the real also remains a mystery. Our attempt to resolve the paradoxical injunction of Thesis Eleven has hit a dead end.

4 From Hegel back to Marx It is clear that the authors of The German Ideology are not criticising just any old concept of history, but specifically that of Hegel. Marx and Engels write: Once the ruling ideas have been separated from the ruling individuals and, above all, from the relations which result from a given stage of the mode of production, and in this way the conclusion has been reached that history is always under the sway of ideas, it is very easy to abstract from these various ideas ‘the Idea’, the thought, etc., as the dominant force in history, and thus to consider all these separate ideas and concepts as ‘forms of self-determination’ of the Concept developing in history. […] Hegel himself confesses at the end of the Geschichtsphilosophie that he ‘has considered the progress of the concept only’ and has represented in history the ‘true theodicy’. (1976: 5:61) Hegel is certainly guilty as charged—his concept of history is indeed the idea of the selfactualization of the concept, and he saw this process, indeed, as a reconciliatory process cognate to theodicy. We could add to the list of charges many more items; perhaps the most important one, and certainly the most pertinent to this discussion, is that Hegel’s term for what Marx understands as ‘ideology’ of a certain historical epoch is ‘spirit’—a term obviously and explicitly laden with Christian metaphysics and theology. Hegel’s concept of history is the very definition of historical idealism. Or is it? It was precisely Hegel’s philosophy which promised to deliver us from the impasse of Kantian epistemology, from the unbridgeable separation between the real as the thing-in-itself and knowledge as the thing-for-us. And since Althusser’s insistence on the separation between the real object and the object of knowledge seems to reproduce this Kantian split—which is what Badiou’s reading implies—we should perhaps look to Hegel’s solution. Let us first reexamine the framework of our investigation. The central problem we are concerned with is the precise relationship between thought and action which Marx and Engels articulated in paradoxical and dubious terms of an exclusive choice: interpretation versus change. Althusser argued that theory is a practice in its own right and proceeded to relocate the split within the field of theory itself, between ideological theoretical practice and scientific theoretical practice. If we map Althusser’s distinction onto the terms of Thesis Eleven, the operative disjunction becomes interpretation versus intervention. It is at this point that Althusser proceeds to articulate the (Kantian, rather than Spinozist) distinction between the real object and the object of knowledge. The reason why Althusser claims Hegel is an idealist philosopher, and indeed a model for all idealism, is precisely because Hegel does not, according to Althusser, distinguish between the real object and the object of knowledge: Hegel’s process of knowledge never leaves the sphere of pure thought, it fully remains in itself, and never even attempts to grasp the real world. As far as Althusser is concerned, Hegel’s philosophy is nothing but a relapse into pre-Kantian metaphysics. However, this understanding is an oversimplification, to the point that it even misses what is centrally at stake for Hegel. Hegel declares, in the Introduction to the Phenomenology of Spirit, that science does not need to begin by investigating the faculty of 275

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cognition itself, this instrument or medium of knowledge, as Kant would have us believe. Instead, Hegel argues, science ‘gets on with the work itself, and actually cognizes something’, and wonders, clearly referring to Kant, ‘whether this fear of error is not just the error itself?’ (1977: 47). This refusal of Kant’s scruples, however, does not mean that science, for Hegel, immediately dwells in the real itself. In fact, if the Phenomenology of Spirit is clear about anything, it is clear about the point that the experience of consciousness consistently demonstrates that its grasp of truth in knowledge inevitably fails. It is true that the book concludes with a passage on ‘the absolute knowledge’, but, while the absolute knowledge does conclude the path of consciousness and inaugurates the passage into science proper, it should not be grasped, as Althusser suggests, as some sort of theological fantasy of the End Judgment (see Althusser 1970: 16). We cannot dwell on this interesting question here; instead, let me refer the reader to Rebecca Comay’s and Frank Ruda’s recent project which situates the problem of the absolute knowledge not in a kind of complete convergence between thinking and being, but rather in the logic of Hegel’s placing of the punctuation mark (Comay and Ruda 2018). I am very sympathetic to their approach insofar as I also understand the problem of absolute knowledge as a matter of making a formal gesture of decision to think, and not as a matter of arriving at a certain content of knowledge. To put it in brief and dogmatic terms: the grasp of truth in knowledge is destined to fail; just like for Kant, for Hegel, too, the real itself remains beyond the domain of discursive knowledge; however, and contrary to Kant, Hegel never supposes that this ‘beyond’ constitutes a region of its own: for Hegel, the real is nothing but the very failure of grasping it in knowledge. This allows us, furthermore, to claim that the various historical failures of grasping the real in the domain of knowledge (the various interpretations of the world, as Marx put it) are thus precisely various historical ideological formations. In other words, not only does Hegel keep the distinction between knowledge and the real, just as Althusser wanted, his formula for resolving the Kantian impasse already gives us a concept of history as well as the idea of intervention in the real: with the historical transformation of its knowledge, the real itself is transformed. Is this not precisely what Althusser was so eagerly searching for? Isn’t this notion of the real precisely what Althusser presupposes when he understands scientific intervention as a kind of a short-circuit where ideology seems to produce, without even realizing it, a truly new scientific concept? But to come back to the question of this final section, and to the final question of this chapter: can Hegel’s dialectical philosophy truly be called a historical materialism? If we follow the letter of the German Ideology and other famous texts by Marx, such as his afterword to the second German edition of Capital, the answer can only be a resounding no. However, the question of Hegel’s materialism is actually a great deal more complicated—everything depends, of course, on what exactly we mean when we say ‘materialism’. As Mladen Dolar has pointed out, Hegel himself did indeed take materialism quite seriously and saw it as a worthwhile idea: ‘One sees, hears, feels, tastes, and smells a multiplicity, a chaos of singularities; it takes a great feat of thought to say “all this is matter”’ (Dolar 2020: 35). In fact, the problem of materialism lies for Hegel elsewhere: For Hegel, matter is not a matter of the senses; it is an idea that forms a totality, an idea that totalizes reality by bringing it to the unity of a single principle, however much it wants to say ‘heterogeneity and diversity’. […] For Hegel, it is not that matter is not the true substance, but rather that the very idea of substantiality is flawed. What is deeply wrong with it is not its materiality and sensual being, but the fact that matter is a proposal for an answer to the question of substantiality, and this is the question one should be rid of, or that should be radically recast. Hence, in Hegel’s notorious formula, ‘substance is subject’. (Dolar 2020: 36) 276

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In a move similar to Hegel’s, Althusser convincingly rejected the naïve materialism present in Marxism, in Theses on Feuerbach and especially in Thesis Eleven, and in the separation between ‘real, active men’ and ‘phantoms formed in the brains of men’. According to Althusser, theory is certainly an activity (or practice) in its own right, and has its own specific relationship with the real, its own specific ‘mode of appropriation’ of the real. The defining trait of materialism cannot lie in a simplistic distinction between theory and practice, consciousness and life, thought and action, form and matter. A proper materialism does not simply invert the traditional order of generation, making matter, rather than form, its demiurgos; instead, it must analyse theory, consciousness and thought as ‘material’ in the same sense as practice, life and action are spontaneously considered ‘material’. The very word ‘practice’ thus carries a very specific meaning for Althusser: it does not simply designate ‘action’ as opposed to ‘mere observation’; rather, it must have the specific meaning of production, which, for Althusser, in the ultimate analysis means a mode of appropriation of the real: apart from economic appropriation, there is also a theoretical mode of appropriation. Up to this point, there is thus no reason why Hegel’s dialectical philosophy should not be considered a materialism, and thus also a historical materialism. But this does not mean that there is no difference between Hegel’s account of history and that of Marx. What truly separates Marx’s account from Hegel’s is that, for Hegel, the contradiction of a given historical epoch is destined to bring about change. For Marx, and Althusser is rightly credited for making this point very clear in his text on ‘Contradiction and Overdetermination’, the contradiction of a given historical epoch is a truly complex contradiction which is not univocally determined by a single force, ‘her majesty the economy’ replacing divine providence as the demiurgos, the begetter of change (Althusser 2005: 113). Althusser warns, specifically, that ideological formations persist even outside of their own historical time; there is no reason why a feudal ideology could, for instance, not survive and prosper with only minor adjustments in a historical conjuncture of fully developed capitalist mode of production. This kind of anachronicity is, strictly speaking, impossible in Hegel’s account of history, where the horizon of what it is possible to think or do is determined by the historical epoch of Spirit; in other words, the historical Spirit is a closed, fully determined totality. Marx, on the contrary, explicitly understands the German political regime of the nineteenth century as ‘an anachronism, a flagrant contradiction of universally recognized axioms, the nullity of the ancien régime revealed to the whole world’ (Marx 1977: 134). Based on the idea of this anachronicity, this temporal delay between the real of the historical epoch and the curious persistence of ancien régime in Germany, he even formulates the stunning claim that ‘the final phase of a world-historical form is its comedy’ (Marx 1977: 134). It is here that we should locate the split between Marx and Hegel, and not in the all-too-simple distinction between consciousness and life or in the insistence on the Kantian separation between the real object and the object of knowledge. And perhaps the parameters of the infamous Thesis Eleven could be of some use on this very point: from a Hegelian perspective, Thesis Eleven is unutterable, because there is, ultimately, no difference between cognizing the real and intervening in the real, that is to say, any grasp of the real inevitably results in the transformation of the real. For Althusserian Marxism, however, the domain of thought is not a closed circle, because it is internally split into imaginary thinking and thinking of the real. It is only the thinking of the real that can foster change.

Notes 1

The author acknowledges the support of the Slovenian Research Agency for funding his project “Theatricality of Power” (J6-1812) at the University of Ljubljana.

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Specifically, Althusser writes: ‘This is the basic logic implied by the famous theme of the “inversion”, the “setting back on to its feet” of the Hegelian philosophy (dialectic), for if it were really a matter merely of an inversion, a restoration of what had been upside down, it is clear that to turn an object right round changes neither its nature nor its content by virtue merely of a rotation! A man on his head is the same man when he is finally walking on his feet. And a philosophy inverted in this way cannot be regarded as anything more than the philosophy reversed except in theoretical metaphor: in fact, its structure, its problems and the meaning of these problems are still haunted by the same problematic’ (2005: 73). This is controversial. At some point, Althusser attempted to defend himself against ‘theoreticist’ readings of his work and argued for a much more modest case, namely that he is only discussing the theoretical practice, and that the political practice remains outside of his domain: ‘No doubt I did speak of the union of theory and practice within “theoretical practice”, but I did not enter into the question of the union of theory and practice within political practice’ (2005: 15). However, this split between the theoretical and the political domain only reproduces the problematic and paradoxical split between interpretation and change introduced by Thesis Eleven.

References Althusser, L. (1970) Reading Capital, (trans.) B. Brewster, London: Verso. Althusser, L. (1971) Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, (trans.) B. Brewster, London: Verso. Althusser, L. (2005) For Marx, (trans.) B. Brewster, London: Verso. Badiou, A. (2017) The Althusserian Definition of ‘Theory’, in N. Nesbitt (ed.), The Concept in Crisis: Reading Capital Today, Durham: Duke University Press, 21–34. Balibar, É. (2007) The Philosophy of Marx, (trans.) C. Turner, London: Verso. Comay, R. and F. Ruda (2018) The Dash—The Other Side of Absolute Knowing, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Dolar, M. (2020) What’s the Matter?: On Matter and Related Matters, in R. Sbriglia and S. Žižek (eds.), Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 31–49. Hegel, G. W. F. (1977) The Phenomenology of Spirit, (trans.) A. V. Miller, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Marx, K. (1977) Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, (trans.) A. Jolin and J. O’Malley, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marx, K. and F. Engels (1976) Collected Works, New York: International Publishers. Marx, K. and F. Engels (1978) Werke, Berlin: Dietz. Spinoza, B. (2002) Complete Works, (trans.) S. Shirley, Indianapolis: Hackett. Tomšič, S. (2015) The Capitalist Unconscious: Marx and Lacan, London: Verso. Young, R. J. C. (2017) Rereading the Symptomatic Reading, in N. Nesbitt (ed.), The Concept in Crisis: Reading Capital Today, Durham: Duke University Press, 35–48. Žižek, S. (2001) Repeating Lenin, lacan.com, https://www.lacan.com/replenin.htm (last accessed: 15 February 2020).

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20 ‘THOUGHTS AND PURPOSES HAVE COME TO ME IN THE SHADOW I SHOULD NEVER HAVE LEARNED IN THE SUNSHINE’ The development of philosophical thinking in the literature of Frances E. W. Harper Catherine Villanueva Gardner

1 Introduction As early as the nineteenth century there were philosophically trained African American academics (all male, due to the educational restrictions on most women), who worked on developing specifically African American academic philosophical thought. John H. McClendon III and Stephen C. Ferguson II in their 2019 work African American Philosophers and Philosophy have begun the construction of an African American philosophical canon that examined the so-called ‘big questions’ of ontology, metaphysics, religion, etc. within the context of black experience, ultimately providing philosophical tools to dismantle racism.1 Forgotten or neglected philosophers such as Henry T. Johnson (1857–n.d.) wrote essays and treatises in which they employed standard philosophical methods of argumentation to achieve this goal. In looking at the traditional ‘big questions’ though the lens of black racial existence, McClendon and Ferguson argue that historical African American thought acts as a complementary thread to the accepted white canon and also as a challenge to the received—‘racially biased’—narrative of the history of philosophy. They claim that if we ignore the African American tradition, then philosophy will continue to be a segregated intellectual activity for white intellectuals only. On the one hand, using the methods and questions of traditional philosophy, and thus traditional philosophical thinking, to dismantle racism demonstrates the intellectual acumen of marginalized African American scholars from the history of philosophy, but, on the other hand, to paraphrase Audre Lorde, using the master’s—‘philosophical’—tools may bring a temporary win, but it is not one to bring about genuine or deep-lasting social or intellectual change. Nineteenth-century African American intellectual Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825–1911) offers, instead, an alternative account of what it is to think philosophically in a racialised context. 279

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Unlike her male contemporaries, Harper did not employ treatises and arguments, nor did she ask general and abstract questions about reality, human nature, or the world in order to dismantle racism; instead, Harper wrote literature and poetry to produce the goal of social justice. Although Amelie Rorty is writing here about the genre of autobiography, what she says is germane to a discussion of Harper’s fiction and poetry as philosophy: ‘“Autobiography”, “philosophy”, “the lyric”, and “the novel” are relatively arbitrary distinguished categories, useful for libraries, bookstores, and university course catalogs. But all these “genres” are alive, in the constant transformations of imitation, of borrower, beggar, and donor’ (2003: xvii). Similarly, Harper’s work blurs and shifts the boundaries between philosophy and literature, and philosophical thought and literary expression. In reclaiming Harper as a philosopher, it is important to explore beyond simply identifying her philosophical system and its goals. In Harper’s case, understanding how and why she conceptualised thinking—‘as a political and personal resistance as well as a humanising strategy under oppression’—is important to understanding her philosophy. The philosophical thinker of Harper’s literature, and especially Iola Leroy, is both raced and gendered. Even though Harper does introduce us to male intellectual characters, we learn about Harper’s concept of philosophical thinking through following the ethico-intellectual journal of Iola Leroy as a black woman. Indeed, unlike a traditional philosophical treatise or essay, her literature also gives the reader the opportunity to learn to think philosophically (in Harper’s sense) herself or himself. Moreover, Harper’s thinker is not the independent, isolated individual of traditional western philosophy, she is part of a community and a family. Harper’s thinker is both embedded in the black community for whom she works, and embodied as a black woman: a situated thinker. A brief personal and intellectual biography of Harper is required at this stage, as few people know of her today, even though she was one of the most successful African American writers during her own time.2 Harper was born to a well-educated free black family in Baltimore, Maryland, and achieved national stature for her literary works, both poetry and novels, and her political participation in the abolition movement (as well as the temperance and suffrage movements). Harper published her recently recovered first collection of poetry in ca. 1845: Forest Leaves. In 1854, Harper began her speaking career in New Bedford, Massachusetts, and subsequently was employed for two years as a traveling lecturer by the Maine Anti-Slavery Society. Harper’s ‘The Two Offers’, published in 1859, in The Anglo-African Magazine is reputed to be the first publication by an African American author, and Harper’s major literary work, the novel Iola Leroy; Or, Shadows Uplifted was first published in 1892. Feminist literary critic Hazel V. Carby claims that Iola Leroy was Harper’s most successful project of her career, incorporating her essays and speeches into a literary form and rooted in the authority of her experiences as an abolitionist, public speaker, teacher and black woman (see Carby 1987: 63). Modern literary critic Frances Smith Foster has been at the forefront of recognizing the philosophical content of Harper’s literature (see Foster 1990: 29). Foster frames Harper as a didactic writer who aims to bring about moral improvement in her audience. Certainly, Harper was profuse in her praise of the literary moralist Harriet Beecher Stowe, which lends credence to Foster’s description.3 However, this identification as a didactic writer may ultimately do more harm than good, as it may lock Harper into the problematic stereotype of ‘Victorian female writer’: overly pious and obsessed with the smaller points of morality at the expense of a view of the larger picture of the good of humanity. Moreover, Foster has not taken the further step of identifying Harper’s moral philosophical system beyond simply labelling it as Utilitarian (1990: 95). Nor has Foster analysed Harper’s critique of the white supremacist imaginary, a central—‘if disguised’—thread in Harper’s works. However, both are central political and moral elements of Harper’s philosophical view and lead to an understanding of Harper’s 280

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account of philosophical thinking: one that produces individual humanisation and racial uplift. This is in clear contrast to the more traditional conceptualisation of philosophical thinking: universal and abstract thinking usually on ‘the big questions’ about the world. Foster sees Harper’s early works as aimed at wooing a white—‘primarily female’—readership initially to support abolitionism and, later in the century, to support black women participating in the suffrage movement.4 However, I want to argue that Harper had two audiences, black and white (although both were primarily female), and her works addressed these audiences on different levels. Historically, there was a high level of literacy among black women in the North at the time she was writing and publishing and thus we should not assume that white women would have been her primary or only audience. Indeed, the very fact that Harper’s major literary works were published well after Emancipation is evidence that her political goals were more complex than Foster suggests and were clearly not about abolitionism.5 Once we examine Harper’s conceptualisation of philosophical thinking, we can see that this complexity is produced by what is best described as a ‘dual layer’ of thinking in her work. While Foster sees Harper as writing not to confront but to persuade gently a white audience, it is clear, if we read below the surface, that Harper in fact sharply critiques her white characters for their racial obtuseness and challenges white supremacist thinking under the cover of the literary medium. For example, Dr Gresham, perhaps the most politically aware of all Harper’s white characters, is shown deliberately by Harper to be a clod—‘and there is no better word’—in his interactions with Iola, the titular character of Iola Leroy. Gresham has grown to love Iola and sympathizes with her sufferings when she was enslaved, and he even claims to be understanding about the fact she would have been ‘tempted’ to have sexual relations with her owners (Harper 1893: 115).6 Here Harper is engaging in her own dual-thinking: on the surface reassuring her white audiences of the ‘truth’ of the problematic oversexualised nature of black women (and thus white men cannot be blamed for past and current ‘indiscretions’ with these women), while on the lower level casting a sidelong quizzical glance at her contemporary black (primarily female) audience. For her black audience Harper is saying that, if Gresham is the ‘best’ white ally of the black race available, perhaps black Americans, led by black women, should uplift themselves, a central tenet of Harper’s philosophy, and this racial uplift is both expressed and examined through Iola’s ethico-intellectual journey. At first blush, it may seem that Harper did not analyse or consider what it is to think philosophically. In particular, she states in one of her earliest essays, Christianity (1853), that philosophy and science ‘have paused amidst their speculative researches and wondrous revelations, to gain wisdom from her [Christianity’s] flowers and knowledge from her [Christianity’s] precepts’ (Foster 1990: 97). Later in the same speech, Harper expands on this intellectual hierarchy: ‘Philosophy and science may bring their abstruse researches and wondrous revelations … but they are idle tales compared to the truths of Christianity … Philosophy searches earth; Religion opens heaven. Philosophy doubts and trembles at the portals of eternity; Religion lifts the veil, and shows us golden streets, lit by the Redeemer’s countenance and irradiated by his smile. Philosophy strives to reconcile us to death; Religion triumphs over it … Philosophy has her place; Religion her important sphere, one is of importance here, the other of infinite and vital importance, both here and hereafter’ (Foster 1990: 98). Harper’s account of the hierarchical relationship between philosophy and religion remained unchanged throughout her intellectual and spiritual life. However, it is also clear that—‘in speaking in this way of philosophy’—Harper was working within the traditional parameters and definitions of philosophy and philosophical thinking: the parameters and definitions this volume has set out to shake. Simply put, speculative or abstruse philosophy was of little use to a people living under oppression or building up their lives and their race after the end of slavery. On the 281

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other hand, Harper does not promote a religious belief that offered rewards to the meek in the afterlife or encouraged passivity in the face of adversity; for Harper, Christianity provides a model for human behaviour, one of self-respect and moral progress. Harper offers a UtilitarianUnitarian system of thought throughout her literature, poems, and speeches.7 Everyone is to work together, contributing their own individual talents, for the overall good, specifically the uplift of what Harper calls ‘the race’, a raising up that will benefit both individuals and her race as a whole. While Harper clearly demands that white Americans contribute to this work, for example in her 1875 speech ‘The Great Problem to Be Solved’, in which she asks what the American people as a whole will do to serve justly the millions of recently freed people, more often than not she states that the leadership of this racial uplift is what she sees as the ‘privilege’ of her fellow African Americans alone (see, for example, Harper 1893: 219). Moreover, Harper argues that African American women, as wives and mothers, have a central role to play in this racial uplift: ‘in the great work of upbuilding there is room for woman’s work and woman’s heart’ (‘The Great Problem to Be Solved’, Foster 1990: 221). Carby argues that Iola Leroy is a forum for an advocacy of an educated elite citing the ‘conversazione’ of the characters in Chapter Thirty of the central race issues of the day (see Carby 1987: 86). However, I would argue that Iola Leroy as a whole goes beyond merely being a forum and works to cohere Harper’s ethicopolitical philosophy in a way that her speeches or even a traditional philosophical genre such as a treatise could not, and I will demonstrate this claim later in my discussion. Harper’s Utilitarianism connects with her Unitarian thought due to her belief that Christ is the model for human action to achieve racial uplift. In a central passage in Iola Leroy, Iola explains this politicized religious ideal when she speaks of the privilege to serve her race: “I do not think life’s highest advantages are those that we can see with our eyes or grasp with our hands. To whom to-day is the world most indebted—to its millionaires or to its martyrs?” “Taking it from the ideal standpoint”, replied the doctor, “I should say its martyrs” … “To be”, continued Iola, “the leader of a race to higher planes of thought and action, to teach men clearer views of life and duty, and to inspire their souls with loftier aims, is a far greater privilege than it is to open the gates of material prosperity and fill every home with sensuous enjoyment”. (Harper 1893: 219) Clearly then, the Utilitarian goal of happiness is not a material goal for Harper, nor is it understood on the pleasure/pain calculus of her close contemporary Jeremy Bentham. Rather, for Harper, happiness is understood in terms of fulfilment of humanity, while the opposite of happiness is understood as denial of humanity. Fulfilment of humanity is closeness to God, both as an end goal in heaven and as a script for our roles and behaviours on earth. The institution of slavery is condemned by Harper because it produces misery and suffering in individuals, the oppression of a race and, thus, the denial of their humanity. Within Harper’s ethico-religious Utilitarian conceptual framework, philosophical thought has a clearly defined role and manner, but we should be clear how Harper understands philosophical thought. For Harper, ‘thinking’ is not the abstruse concept or speculative practice we traditionally associate with philosophical thinking. Framed within the lived experiences and oppressions of African Americans of the nineteenth century, in both the North and the South, thinking is a moral and political activity: a resistance to dehumanisation and oppression. In a world specifically constructed to dehumanise in order to dominate, thinking for the characters of Harper’s novels and poems provided both humanisation and proved their humanity. On the 282

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surface, these characters are brutalized and oppressed, but below the surface they provide a commentary that resists this existence to the reader as well as to each other in safe spaces, such as the safe space of the makeshift ‘church’ held in the woods in Iola Leroy where the characters speak into a cracked pot to tell of their hopes and fears. ‘Aunt’ Linda, an enslaved woman, tells another slave about their prayer meetings in this church and he says in response: ‘Well, you had better look out, and not shout too much, and pray and sing too loud, because, ‘fore you know, the patrollers will be on your track and break up your meetin’ in a mighty big hurry, before you can say “Jack Robinson”’.8 ‘Oh, [Linda responds] we looks out for dat. We’s got a nice big pot, dat got cracked las’ winter, but it will hole a lot o’water, an’ we puts it whar we can tell it everything’ (Harper 1893: 13).9 Thus, in speaking their thoughts and voicing their resistance into the cracked pot, a moral and political thought strategy, these enslaved characters can resist their oppression and critique their white masters, proving their humanity and providing humanisation. Most of us are familiar with historical and literary narratives of slaves feigning ignorance, playing the fool, or overtly performing white supremacist stereotypes in order to survive. But Harper does not engage with her readers by replicating these potentially damaging tropes in her literary work. Even if feigned ignorance, for example, is an act of resistance, it still reinforces the stereotype of the lack of intelligence of African Americans. Rather, in Harper’s work, thinking under white supremacist oppression requires the ‘dual-thinking’ I discuss. The ‘upper’ or ‘surface’ level is a survival strategy, one primarily on a physical level. The lower level is also a survival strategy, but in this case it functions differently, as it functions to preserve the humanity of the enslaved, while also acting as a form of resistance to white supremacy. The two best examples in Harper’s literary work of this dual-thinking are conversations among the enslaved in her best known novel, Iola Leroy and the Aunt Chloe Fleet series of poems in Sketches of Southern Life. After this textual analysis, I will then show that this dual layer of thinking requires literary expression. Harper’s ethico-political dual-thinking, with its accompanying humanisation, is not a good ‘fit’ for standard philosophical genres, such as a treatise or essay.

2 ‘Aunt’ Chloe and learning to think Harper’s poems from the post-war period at first seem to reflect her primary commitments to her religious belief (such as ‘It Shall Not Come Nigh Thee’), temperance (such as ‘Save the Boys’), and women’s rights (such as ‘John and Jacob—’A Dialogue on Women’s Rights’). Harper’s political and moral thought was expressed in her public speeches, but this thought is offered piecemeal. Nowhere in these speeches does she offer a sustained and coherent account of her philosophical thought. Harper’s poetry on temperance does, however, contain some philosophical content, and this may be unexpected. In ‘The Ragged Stocking’, for example, the narrator rejects ‘the bondage of the bowl’. He is saved from the clutches of alcohol by coming to the realisation of the love he has for his family and the responsibility he has for them. Similarly, in ‘The Fatal Pledge’, the young man is ‘a slave’ to alcohol, but when he stops drinking he is ‘erect and free’ and ‘a man again’. In ‘Women’s Work’, we are told that women have been ‘blessed’ or singled out by God for the work of saving men from drink and to preserve homes for families. The comparison of the hold that alcohol has over men to slavery is not hyperbole or Victorian moralising in Harper’s case. Like the institution of slavery, alcoholism destroyed families and is dehumanising in that its victims lack self-control or courage. In other literary works, Harper refers to the physical distortions brought on by alcohol such as bloated faces, bloodshot eyes, and shuffling gait, similar to the physical and psychological damage brought on by a life of enslavement. 283

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However, it is crucial to see that Harper did also write poems with slavery as their subject matter even after the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, in particular the Aunt Chloe series of six poems written in 1871 and published in 1872.10 Given that these poems would no longer function to support abolitionism, we should consider what message or meaning these poems would have had. The Chloe series depicts the world of uneducated and rustic enslaved folks and their life after Emancipation. Chloe speaks directly to the audience and to her fellow slaves. She never speaks to her white owners but instead offers a running—‘and increasingly critical’—commentary on them and their lives. The Chloe series offers a perfect example of thinking and living under oppression moving to humanisation. We are first introduced to the character Chloe in the opening poem ‘Aunt Chloe’ when she narrates how she finds out that her sons are to be sold away from her to pay the recently deceased ‘master’s’ debts. ‘Mistus’ is in the house crying over her financial woes, so it is left to another slave, Milly, to alert Chloe to the fate of her children (Harper 1891: 3). Note that ‘Mistus’ is not crying over losing her ‘slave family’, as some historical and literary narratives would suggest about the relationships of the people living on these plantations.11 At this point Chloe is depicted by Harper as quite passive; for example, it is left to Milly to advise Chloe to say goodbye properly to her sons while she still has the chance. That brief comment shows the emotionally circumscribed life of the African American slave, where not only does Chloe not have a say in the future of her children, but often parents were given little or no notice their children would be taken away. Without her children, Chloe is lost and helpless, but then another slave, Jacob, tells her to put her faith in God, and she feels her ‘… heavy burden/Rolling like a stone away’ (Harper 1891: 5). The modern reader may see this resolution of Chloe’s suffering as sentimentalised and irrelevant for philosophical thinking, but Chloe also hears a whisper that tells her ‘You’ll get justice in the kingdom/If you do not get it here’ (1891: 5). Here we have our first inkling that Chloe is not a cipher or a one-dimensional character. Justice, for Chloe, is not simply liberation from white oppression or the return of her children, although, obviously, this is morally appropriate. Justice is ‘Mistus’ being left all alone when her son is killed in the war and all her (enforced) servants are freed: ‘I’m richer now than Mistus/Because I’ve got my son … /And she’s got ‘nary one’, as Chloe tells us in the final poem of the series, ‘The Reunion’ (1891: 21). In a central poem in the series, ‘Learning to Read’, Chloe describes the slaves’ desire to learn to read: Our masters always tried to hide Book learning from our eyes; Knowledge did’nt agree with slavery—’Twould make us all too wise. But some of us would try to steal A little from the book. And put the words together, And learn by hook or crook. I remember Uncle Caldwell, Who took pot liquor fat And greased the pages of his book, And hid it in his hat. And had his master ever seen The leaves upon his head, He’d have thought them greasy papers, But nothing to be read. (1891: 17–18)

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Here, Harper poignantly describes the dual-layered cognitive life of the enslaved: the master only sees greasy paper while the slaves see knowledge and the path to humanisation. Once liberated, Chloe herself learns to read: ‘Then I got a little cabin—’/A place to call my own—’/ And I felt as independent/As the queen upon her throne’ (1891: 19). Being able to read is one element of Chloe’s learning to think, a process or development we see throughout this series. Chloe finds God, freedom and independence, and an understanding of justice or morality. Chloe grows to understand that the institution of slavery is a morally wrongful one in itself, not simply because of the way it damages her emotionally with the splitting of her family. The final element in Chloe’s process of learning to think is in her politics. In ‘The Deliverance’, she laughs at the newly freed ex-slaves who sell their vote for goods and are cheated, and applauds the wives who force their husbands to return the rations. Chloe is not saying that all African American men are fools, but she is clearly saying that African American women are not. For Chloe, selling your vote is tantamount to selling your race, which is a devastating indictment given the history of selling people racialised-as-black: ‘Now I don’t believe in looking/Honest people in the face/And saying when you’re doing wrong/That “I haven’t sold my race”’ (1891: 16). Chloe gains her freedom, learns to read, and she finds God, but there is also a recovery of her humanity, which we can see through a change in her thinking through the course of the poems: she questions, then she critiques, then she mocks, then she plans for her family. And it is important to notice that the final piece in Chloe’s learning to think/humanisation is that it takes place embedded within her family and community. While she does spare a thought for ‘Mistus’ Chloe is no longer passive. She is laughing along with the reader and recognising the justice of the unhappiness of ‘Mistus’. And it is interesting to note that humanity for Chloe is not to be saint-like; Chloe is fully human in that she does take some pleasure in the misery of her former owner and she is critical of those who sell their votes. Thus, with this apparently simple series of poems, Harper shows the reader, through Chloe as a mouthpiece, how the enslaved learned to think. Obviously, Chloe and the others could ‘think’ in the sense they had cognitive processes that allowed them to process and apply information, etc. But the thinking Harper describes is both moral and political and part of their racial uplift, a conceptualisation which is further developed in Iola Leroy.

3 Iola Leroy and learning to think Unlike the poems in the ‘Aunt Chloe’ series, Harper’s best-known novel, Iola Leroy, depicts the world, aspirations, and responsibilities of the educated classes of black Americans both during the war and Reconstruction. Published in 1892, twenty years after the Chloe series, Iola Leroy demonstrates that Harper’s philosophical views, while further developed over time, still retain their core values of racial uplift and humanisation. Iola Leroy is the story of Iola and her small family’s resistance to being framed within/living within the white supremacist imaginary. Even though the central character, Iola, and her family have social advantages compared to Chloe and her friends, they still do not have the physical, economic, or social power to resist the white dominant society; instead, Iola learns to resist through her thinking, in particular through the development of her moral and political thinking that is both embodied as a black woman and embedded in her family and identification with her race. Iola provides an important counterpart to Chloe, and, significantly, critics tend to agree that the character of Iola represents Harper herself. Iola Leroy apparently begins by following a narrative of tragedy in the vein of what has been called the literary trope of the ‘tragic mulatta’, first introduced in 1842 in Lydia Maria Child’s 285

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short story ‘The Quadroons’. The daughter of a white father and his light-skinned slave, this character only learns of her racial heritage when her father dies. She herself subsequently dies in slavery. This character typically rejects her black heritage and lives passing as white, although constantly in fear of being discovered.12 Yet, what should be essentially a narrative of tragedy, instead has a relatively happy ending in Iola Leroy where Iola finds her family, marries and pursues her mission of racial uplift, and we should recognise that family and serving her race are more important to Iola/Harper than marriage. In order to read the novel as something more than another tale of the ‘tragic mulatta’, we must turn it on its head and engage in a dual layered reading ourselves. Iola Leroy does not follow the trajectory of the ‘tragic mulatta’; rather, the novel itself rejects this trope and critiques the imaginary of white supremacy itself that produces the trope. Sometimes Harper’s critique is achieved through direct comments, but in itself the narrative of the novel is a critique. The white characters are typically one-dimensional, whereas, in contrast, Iola Leroy is not a story about black life; rather, it is the story of black life, on its own terms. This becomes clear when the reader sees the white overlay—‘such examples as Robert’s thumbs, Iola’s temptation, and Dr. Latrobe’—and the black comments/responses. The opening passages of Iola Leroy provide a clear example of dual-thinking under oppression when the reader ‘overhears’ a curious conversation between two enslaved men, Thomas and Robert, talking about the freshness of the butter that day. They meet with a third man who enthusiastically reports that the fish in the market are fresh, and when they tell a fourth man that the eggs are fresh, he says ‘“I thought so; mighty long faces at de pos’-office dis mornin”’ (Harper 1893: 8). Harper, using her authorial voice, explains that the enslaved use such conversations to inform each other about the success of the war (‘fresh market produce’) or the fears of the white people about the success of the war. However, these characters are not just using ‘coded’ speech for a form of communication as a survival strategy; rather, this speech is also ‘dual-thinking’. On the upper or surface level it was vital for the enslaved to know about the progress of the war for their own physical safety or potential liberation; however, simply gaining and disseminating this knowledge would have been a very passive reaction to their bondage. On the hidden or lower level—‘one that it is only shared with enslaved others and Harper’s audience’—Thomas and Robert and the unnamed others are asserting their ability to think about and evaluate the larger picture of the politics and morality of the Civil War.13 In this way, the enslaved are asserting their humanity as individuals and for their race. While these enslaved men are not physically fighting or standing up to their ‘owners’, this independence of thinking, this mental refusal to accept a social construct that reduces them to objects, humanises them. Moreover, on a more minor level, coded speech allows these men to amuse themselves at their masters’ expense. Like Chloe, humanisation in this instance also allows for a more rounded human life. I have already discussed one example of the dual-layered understanding of Iola’s enslavement, with the white Dr Gresham believing Iola would have been tempted to have sexual relations with her white enslavers (he gives no reason for why on earth he would think this about a woman he claims he admires) while Iola’s black audience would recognize the stereotypical assumptions about their sexuality that would mould the lives of Iola and her black female contemporaries. Similar examples occur throughout the novel. Robert Johnson, an enslaved man, is taught to read and write by his ‘owner’, not for Robert’s own benefit but ‘on the same principle she would have taught a pet animal amusing tricks’ (1893: 16).14 The owner’s cousin on hearing that Robert is literate is horrified, and says she would have cut off Robert’s thumbs, while the cousin’s husband interjects to say that Robert would then be unfit to pick cotton. Thus on the upper layer, the white people in Robert’s life see him as closer to a pet or simply as a body to work for them. Beneath the surface, Robert uses his ability to read 286

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to keep the other enslaved people informed about the war, and in recounting his own version of this tale to them, Robert says: ‘As to my poor thumbs, it did not seem to be taken into account what it would cost me to lose them’ (1893: 46). In finding out and disseminating information Robert helps others, but his ironic analysis of the situation demonstrates his ability to think critically, resist his oppression and even to see the dark humour in the situation, all facets leading to his humanisation. A novel is the appropriate medium to provide this dual-thinking. It is as if the page is divided in two, with the white narrative and the black narrative in two columns. The novel begins with the slaves talking in this dual-thought, and for Harper’s black audience that would have been enough of a signal to let them know this was a dual narrative. The buffoonish Dr Latrobe, a white public intellectual, makes an all too brief appearance in Iola Leroy, but Harper makes a significant point with his character. Latrobe is overtly racist, holding that racial mixing—‘whether biological or social’—will drag down the white race, and that people racialised-as-black should be kept in their place by white people. Latrobe believes that he has the rare ability to identify those who are ‘passing’ as white. Thus, when he meets Dr Latimer, an intelligent and articulate young man, Latrobe is appalled to find this apparently white man proudly claiming his own black heritage. Literally lost for words, Latrobe huffily exits the room. With Latrobe’s need to exit, Harper is showing her audience that this overlay of white supremacist thinking is not easy to maintain and requires choosing how one lives. In Latrobe’s case, such a blinkered, limited life that may even require a physical escape to maintain his white supremacist illusions. The character of Iola offers a way into further exploration of dual-thinking as we follow Iola’s path to learning to ‘think’ in Harper’s philosophical sense, one that we can now see is a ‘racialised’ way of thinking. At the beginning of the novel, Iola believes she is white, and—‘unlike Chloe’—she has all the social advantages of a wealthy young white woman. As well as education and a life of pampered leisure, Iola has the luxury of not having to think about the system of slavery that maintains her lifestyle; indeed, Iola believes the system is a benevolent one. Here, for Harper and for her readers, ‘think’ is meant in the sense of reflect morally or critique politically, rather than a simple cognitive process. When questioned by one of her friends at the Northern school she attends if she would not want her freedom if she were a slave, Iola replies: ‘“Oh, the cases are not parallel. Our slaves do not want their freedom. They would not take it if we gave it to them”’ (1893: 97–98). In speaking so, Iola does not simply lack a critical examination of the world and a lack of reflection about this world, she lacks an ethicopolitical understanding of racial injustice, which she only reaches when she experiences injustice herself. With the unexpected death of her father, Iola finds out that her mother, even though she lives as the apparently legal wife with Iola’s father, is in fact a slave who has not been legally manumitted.15 Therefore, as the child of a slave Iola is automatically a slave herself, and her father’s heir wastes little time in selling Iola to potentially brutal slave traders. Iola is rudely awakened from what Harper sees as the ‘dew-drop’ world of the protected white woman, but it is important to see how Harper depicts this awakening.16 Although Iola does feel personally aggrieved at these wrongs, she now learns to think, specifically, she learns to think as a black woman on behalf of her race, a trajectory we follow throughout the rest of the novel. Iola now states: ‘“I used to say that slavery is right. I didn’t know what I was talking about”’ [italics added for emphasis] (1893: 106). Iola recognises that her brutal experiences as a slave have taught her to think, not in the sense of a cognitive process, but in the sense of an ethico-political understanding of black life and needs:

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Thoughts and purposes have come to me in the shadow I should never have learned in the sunshine … I intend … to cast my lot with the freed people as a helper, teacher, and friend. I have passed through a fiery ordeal, but this ministry of suffering will not be in vain. I feel that my mind has matured beyond my years … It seems as if years had been compressed into a few short months. (1893: 114) Iola’s thinking continues to develop when she moves North with what remains of her family after the war. In the supposedly enlightened North, Iola and her family experience difficulties finding, even among self-proclaimed Christians, someone who will rent them lodgings. Iola believes it is important for women to earn their own living, but she struggles to find a place that will continue to employ her once they find out about her racial heritage. To a modern reader Iola’s employment may not seem a significant point, but by choosing—‘indeed insisting’—on working as a saleswoman without hiding her racial identity, Iola is showing something important about her thinking. Unlike white women who typically aspired during this period to be ladies of leisure and/or hoped to marry into such a life, Iola chooses to work at an honest trade while keeping her integrity intact. In this way, Iola is challenging and has broken through the historical intersections of race and gender produced by a white supremacist patriarchy, crystallized in the ‘Cult of Domesticity and True Womanhood’, an ideology framed for and really only accessible to white women.17 The life of a saleswoman is not particularly glamourous or intellectually challenging given what we know of Iola’s character and education, but it is symbolic of her newly developed belief system. She is rejecting the life of the leisurely white woman that her childhood and education prepared her to lead, and she is challenging the system of white supremacy that restricts black women from leading lives of independence and integrity. Iola meets Lucille Delany who had been inspired to start a school for young black women. Lucille had read in the newspapers that there was a growing belief among white people that women racialised-as-black were no longer fit to be their servants. Lucille reasoned that if this were indeed the case, then black women would not be fit to raise their own children, and she opens a school to train future wives and mothers (Harper 1893: 199). Here, Lucille is a mouthpiece for Harper’s views of the role ordinary or non-elite black women will play in racial uplift. In the final chapters of Iola Leroy the characters are members of the educated elite discussing the best way forward for their race. Dr Gresham, who returns to the narrative, continues to be the most enlightened and progressive white character, but here is what he says: ‘Power’, said Dr Gresham, naturally gravitates into the strongest hands. The class who have the best brain and most wealth strike with the heaviest hand. I have too much faith in the inherent power of the white race to dread the competition of any other people under heaven’ (1893: 223). Gresham still loves Iola, he enjoys the companionship of her family, and he has seen hundreds of African Americans die in battle fighting against the confederacy. Yet, despite Gresham’s intellectual acceptance of the principles of justice, he cannot see beyond the white supremacist imaginary. Thus, after Emancipation, the dual-thinking of Iola Leroy does not disappear; rather it continues in a more complex manner. No longer simply about survival and resistance to dehumanisation, it becomes about uplift of African Americans within Harper’s UtilitarianUnitarian framework. Harper does not privilege an educated elite with the role of racial uplift, ‘ordinary’ black women and mothers have an important role to play through the way they raise their families and by living with humility (but not submissively). In her 1892 speech, ‘Enlightened Motherhood’, Harper describes the home as an institution older than schools or even the church, where children can be trained to be useful citizens and prepared for 288

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companionship with God in heaven. For Harper, this education and influencing of children by their mothers is compared to being ‘a true artist’ (Foster 1990: 286). Harper compares marriage to being a mother of homes, and thus marriage should not be entered into without care or thought. Ultimately, as Harper describes it, the home is an institution for humanity, protecting children from losing their humanity due to alcohol or prostitution, and a place where children learn to think and act morally, to learn what Harper calls ‘the science of true life’ (Foster 1990: 292). Moreover, while direct physical oppression has stopped, Harper’s characters still live in a world constricted by the white supremacist imaginary. Harper’s characters need to resist the socalled truths about the inferiority of their race and the superiority of the white race in order to be free to uplift and claim political freedom and advancement. Iola resists through her newfound way of thinking, a form of philosophical thinking that is one of moral and political development. Thinking in Harper’s context is not simply a psychological or cognitive process. Nor is it abstruse or speculative philosophical thinking. Harper’s philosophical thinking, as we see through the ethico-intellectual development of both Chloe and Iola, is both a process of humanisation for the individual and an end: directed towards the uplift and thus increase in happiness though humanisation of their race.

4 Conclusion The ‘literary turn’ of moral philosophy in the 1980s brought back into vogue the view that literature can help us develop empathy for lives other than ours and hone our moral perceptions by seeing the world through the eyes of others.18 And that would have been the initial level on which Harper’s audiences would have, and still can, read her works. But I use ‘audiences’ in the plural for good reason. Harper is partially writing to invite her white audience to take up a moral attitude toward racial injustice. They are being invited to ‘think’ in the sense of developing their moral imagination, in contrast to the lack of moral imagination of Dr Gresham, who upholds racial justice in his reason or intellect only. But would Harper’s black audience, who may themselves have actually lived a narrative like Iola’s or perhaps such a narrative would have been part of their family’s history, have genuinely needed to develop empathy for their fellow African Americans or to hone their moral perceptions about the injustices done to their race? Perhaps, instead, Harper’s black audience would have read a novel that both justified their anger over past and present injustices and provided a roadmap to racial uplift, to learn to think in the way that Iola herself has learnt to think about racial injustice and racial uplift.19 Moreover, below the surface of the novel Harper engages in a scorching critique of the white characters (even the ‘good’ Dr Gresham) and the imaginary of white supremacy. Why did Harper choose literature rather than an essay or treatise or other standard philosophical genre to express her philosophical thought? One obvious practical answer is that Harper, like most nineteenth-century women of any race, did not have the formal education required to write what we define as classical or traditional philosophy in the traditional genres of treatises or essays.20 Another obvious practical answer is Harper’s own safety. Harper did travel to the South after the war, where she observed the precarious nature of African American life.21 Minnie’s Sacrifice (1868), one of her three recently rediscovered novels, shows Harper’s awareness of the dangers of working to raise up the African American community after Emancipation or even the precariousness of African American life itself.22 In the novel, Minnie and her husband, Louis, both grow up believing they are white. Like Iola, they renounce their social, economic, and political privileges and choose to self-identify as black when they discover 289

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their heritage; indeed, the couple work to raise up the newly emancipated. The novel ends—‘in an abrupt manner’—with Minnie being lynched.23 However, Harper supplies her own more philosophical answer—‘in the sense of philosophical thinking I am attributing to Harper’—in one of the final chapters of Iola Leroy. Iola expresses her desire to be of service to her race, and Dr. Latimer, who Iola will eventually marry, recommends she ‘write a good, strong book which would be helpful to them … [to] Write, out of the fullness of your heart, a book to inspire men and women with a deeper sense of justice and humanity’ (Harper 1893: 262). Moreover, it is not just important that Iola (or whomever) write a widely read, successful novel, but that this book be written by another African American: Miss Leroy, out of the race must come its own thinkers and writers. Authors belonging to the white race have written good racial books, for which I am deeply grateful, but it seems to be almost impossible for a white man to put himself completely in our place. No man can feel the iron which enters another man’s soul. (1893: 263)24 The form of a novel provided an appropriate medium for the expression of Harper’s ethicopolitical philosophy. There was a high level of literacy among women in the North, and the form of a novel allows for an extended ‘argument’, which a speech could not. In the nineteenth century women were the main consumers of novels, and it is important to recognize that women were Harper’s primary audience for her public speeches. In fact, Harper typically spoke to women only, she often she did not charge and sometimes spoke more than once a day in an effort to reach this audience. Thus, it is not a huge leap to conclude that women were the primary audience for Iola Leroy. It would be a mistake to assume that only ‘high-brow’ literature can be moral philosophy or express philosophical thinking. Indeed, when we consider Harper’s main audience (black women), this would be a potentially problematic assumption. Certainly, Iola Leroy may not be ‘great literature’, or maybe it would be fairer to say that Harper’s style of writing is no longer the aesthetic fashion. If, however, we see Harper as writing to serve her race (as Dr Latimer recommends to Iola), then we have a new perspective on this novel. On the surface we have a novel that is often sentimental about the literal and spiritual journey of a noble heroine and her family, a narrative perhaps aimed primarily at developing the empathy of Harper’s white audience. Below the surface, however, is a work of ethico-political philosophy, a work that both explains Harper’s account of philosophical thinking and describes Iola’s ethico-intellectual journey. Indeed, unlike a traditional treatise or essay, her literature gives the reader their own opportunity to learn to think philosophically (in Harper’s sense) herself or himself. In this way, Harper’s ethico-political dual-thinking, with its accompanying humanisation, is not a good ‘fit’ for standard philosophical genres, such as a treatise or an essay, but it dovetails well with literary genres.

Notes 1 It is important to note that for McClendon and Ferguson an African American philosopher is defined as someone with a philosophy degree and/or a faculty position. 2 I have not included much information about Harper’s personal life, as I am critical of the psychophilosophical interpretations of the work of historical women philosophers that are rarely applied to male philosophers. 3 Indeed, Harper wrote a poem in response to Uncle Tom’s Cabin thanking Stowe in 1854.

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Philosophical thinking 4 Harper, like many of her contemporaries, was conflicted over black women’s suffrage due, in part, to the overt racism in the U.S. movement for women’s suffrage. 5 Moreover, women’s suffrage is not a primary issue for Harper. 6 Here Harper is referencing the stereotype of black women as oversexed that ‘justified’ the sexual assault of black women by white men. See, for example, Hill’s germinal work on the controlling stereotype of the ‘Jezebel’ (Hill 2000: 81). 7 Here is a common formulation of the Unitarian faith from roughly 1870 to the late 1920s: The Unitarian Covenant ‘We believe in: The Fatherhood of God; The Brotherhood of Man; The Leadership of Jesus; Salvation by Character; The Progress of Mankind onward and upward forever’ (American Unitarian Conference™: Unitarian Christianity). 8 Linda is unlikely to have been anyone’s actual relative. 9 Critics have pointed to the fact that Harper’s more rustic or uneducated characters tend to be depicted as using stereotypical black dialect. Given that, the point of my overall discussion is dual-thinking under oppression to ensure survival, this use of dialect may not necessarily be problematic and instead serve to make my point. 10 Like Linda, Chloe is unlikely to have been anyone’s blood relative. 11 Baptist (2014) argues that the slave system was a capitalist system, regardless of actual blood ties or the supposed intimacy of the black ‘family’ of slaves, and thus slaves were valuable economic property. The fact that two young men—usually the highest valued workers—were sold suggests that ‘Mistus’ had kept her financial wits about her through her grief. 12 Even as late as 1959 with the film Imitation of Life (Hunter and Sirk), this trope continues. In the film, the mixed-race young woman is beaten by her white boyfriend when he discovers her heritage, and she disowns her back mother, choosing to live as white. The ending is, of course, tragic. 13 Modern historians of the Civil War are now offering more politically and morally complex interpretations of the causes and goals of the war. 14 Historically, not all American slaves were illiterate by law. There was some variation in literacy laws by time period and state. 15 Iola’s father would not have been legally permitted to marry one of his slaves, even though living as husband and wife would not have been rare. Interracial marriage may have been possible, depending on the laws of the state and particular time period. 16 ‘I do not believe that white women are just dewdrops exhaled from the skies.’ 1866 Speech at the eleventh National Women’s Rights convention in New York: We Are All Bound Up Together. 17 Even though Harper appears to promote similar ideals for African American women of piety, purity, domesticity, and submissiveness, their meaning is different. Harper’s ideals for women are framed within her philosophy of racial uplift. Thus, women are charged with education of children, submission to God (not man), while Harper critiques the sexual double standard. 18 See, for example, Nussbaum (1990). 19 Harper’s white audience would have been able to understand this conceptualization of thinking and its necessity, but it would not have been available to them due to their social and historical location. 20 As McClendon and Ferguson demonstrate, classical philosophical training was restricted to men. 21 For example, in a letter from Alabama written in 1871 Harper writes, ‘Only yesterday I heard of a murder committed on a man for an old grudge of several years standing … Last summer a Mr. Luke was hung, and several other men also, I heard’. (Demopolis, Alabama. March 1(?), 1871; Foster 1990: 132). 22 Rediscovered by Frances Smith Foster in the 1990s. 23 During the 1890s approximately 175 African Americans were lynched in any given year, women and children as well as men. 24 A classic Biblical reference to the enslavement of Joseph.

References American Unitarian Conference™. (2006) http://www.americanunitarian.org/AUCChristian.htm, last accessed: 4 February 2020. Baptist, E. (2014) The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism, New York: Basic Books. Carby, H. (1987) Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Catherine Villanueva Gardner Child, L. (2001 [1842]) The Quadroons, (ed.) J. Landrith, Virginia: Pious Pagan Publishing. Collins, P. (2000) Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, 2nd ed., London and New York: Routledge. Foster, F. (1990) A Brighter Coming Day: A Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Reader, New York: The Feminist Press. Harper, F. (ca. 1840–51) Forest Leaves, Baltimore: Printer, James Young. Harper, F. (1891) Sketches of Southern Life, Philadelphia: Ferguson Bros. & Co. Printers. Harper, F. (1893) Iola Leroy, or, Shadows Uplifted, 2nd ed., Philadelphia, PA: Garrigues Brothers. Lorde, A. (2007) Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, Reprint, New York: Crossing Press. McClendon III, J. and S. Ferguson II. (2019) African American Philosophers and Philosophy: An Introduction to the History, Concepts, and Contemporary Issues, London: Bloomsbury. Nussbaum, M. (1990) Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rorty, A. (2013) The Many Faces of Philosophy: Reflections from Plato to Arendt, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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21 THE VOID OF THOUGHT AND THE AMBIVALENCE OF HISTORY Chaadaev, Bakunin, and Fedorov Kirill Chepurin and Alex Dubilet

1 Introduction This paper cuts across three different Russian thinkers in order to bring out a particularly fruitful, albeit unorthodox, trajectory common to them.1 The conceptual terrain that we trace below is not restricted to these thinkers, but disturbs and preoccupies much of nineteenth-century Russian thought. This essay—as well as the larger, book-length project of which it is a part, Nothing to Be Done: History, Immanence, and the Void in 19th-Century Russian Thought—re-evaluates the standing of nineteenth-century Russian thinking by refracting it through the conceptual concerns of contemporary continental theory. Our essay follows the thought of each of the three figures—Pyotr Chaadaev, Mikhail Bakunin and Nikolai Fedorov—as a way of exploring the questions that they themselves considered decisive in relation to the task of thinking. At its most inventive, Russian philosophical thinking functioned fundamentally outside of professional philosophy and strictly philosophical divisions and genres—and was instead vitally concerned with questions such as ‘Where must thought begin?’, ‘What is it that thought must think?’, and ‘What is the place (or non-place) of thinking?’. And most significantly, ‘How might we conceptually relate to the world and its history, without justifying the violent and dominating logics that underlie them?’. The resulting trajectory of thought is profoundly ambivalent, caught between articulating an ungrounding of world history, on the one hand, and more familiar philosophical-historical modes of its justification, on the other—between a thought that erupts against the modern world and its inherited modes of thought, and a thought that remains within their boundaries and logics. In our reconstructions, we seek to make visible this fundamental ambivalence, while also underscoring the unique and rebellious element within each figure. What follows is thus an immanent as well as a speculative re-reading, which delineates a complex theoretical terrain arising out of a common attempt to think the violence of the world and its history—and to think affirmatively that which world history forecloses and declares to be nothing. As we will see, this will entail the emergence of unorthodox figures of futurity and the common, as well as an unorthodox image of thought.

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2 Nothingness without history: Russia and the void2 There is something paradoxical, perhaps even ironic, in the fact that Pyotr Chaadaev’s (1794–1856) Philosophical Letters—epistolary meditations on Russia, religion, and world history written in French at the end of the 1820s—have often been considered to mark the beginning of the most fruitful period of Russian thought. After all, what they affirmed was precisely the barrenness, even nothingness, of the territory bearing the name ‘Russia’, proclaiming it to be a world-historical void without any participation in the course of the providential history culminating in the Christian-European world, without any thought or life to call its own, without a past or the possibility of a future. A text of singular force, the Philosophical Letters enacted a displacement of Russia into the groundless void that annuls the logic of historical temporality: We [Russians] have never moved in concert with other peoples; we do not belong to any of the great families of humankind; we are neither of the West nor of the East, and we possess the traditions neither of one nor of the other. Situated as though outside of time, we have not been touched by the universal education of humankind. This admirable interconnection of human ideas over successive centuries, this history of the human spirit, which has led it to its present state in the rest of the world, have had no effect upon us. […] No one [here] has a fixed sphere of existence; there are no proper habits, no rules at all for anything. […] Everything passes, flows away, leaving no trace either outside or within you. […] We have nothing of our own to serve as a basis for our thinking […] [I]solated by a strange destiny from the universal movement of humanity, we have taken in nothing of the traditional ideas of humankind. […] Our memories reach back no further than yesterday; we are, so to say, strangers to ourselves. We move through time in such a singular manner that, as we advance, the past is irretrievably lost to us.3 (1991a: 89–92, 323–26) No wonder that upon the publication of this letter in Moscow in 1836, a public uproar ensued, leading Chaadaev to be declared a madman by the emperor, Nicholas I—but also provoking Russian thought to a hitherto unprecedented degree, making it impossible for it not to confront the proclaimed nothingness of Russian history and existence. The position of Chaadaev the speaker in these letters is ambivalent, alternating between a Russian ‘we’ and a European or world-historical ‘we’—but insofar as Chaadaev, a Europeanized Russian nobleman writing in French, is speaking for Russia and as himself Russian, he is speaking on behalf of the void that is absolutely excluded from history. That is to say, not only politically, but also theoretically, declaring Russia a non-place in space and time, a singular nothingness without history or topos, so as to speak of an (impossible) ‘we’ that inhabits this nothingness, was an audacious move on Chaadaev’s part. It introduced, and gave voice to, a negativity completely decoupled from the logic of history and historical possibility; a negativity that is completely void, indexing, as it were, withoutness as such. In modern philosophy of history prior to Chaadaev there had, of course, been sites of world-historical exclusion—such as, infamously, Africa in Hegel. Hegel himself did not, however, speak on behalf of Africa; and even that exclusion was arguably less radical, relegating the African continent to a prehistoric past—a place more easily comprehensible vis-à-vis the logic of world history. In Chaadaev, Russia becomes the name for the absolute exclusion from the logic of history—even from the position of pre-history—a void without relation or attachment to the world-historical whole, 294

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so much so that it indicates a quasi-cosmological exclusion, of not belonging ‘to any of the systems of the moral universe’ (1991 a: 198, 433). This nonbelonging and nonattachment is what Chaadaev’s text at once critiques and inhabits—a necessarily doubled vision. The ambivalence between the Russian and the European ‘we’ in the Letters should not, however, be considered a mere inconsistency. To even be able to speak of the ‘we’, of a nothingness for which nothing is proper and thus in which no national identity is possible, Chaadaev had to position himself at the parallax between the two. This duality is, however, radically asymmetrical, so that, in a subversion of the standard logic of the binary, one term is fully annulled or voided, persisting in a nonrelation to the other. On this account, the term ‘Russia’ names the total absence of everything that ‘Europe’, or the European tradition, is; and given that the latter is, for Chaadaev, everything (that has been actual or possible within the world-historical logics of inheritance, tradition, and kinship), Russia can only be characterized as a nothingness without history, an a-topic, ungrounded site of absolute exclusion. Chaadaev diagnoses it as a state of exception: ‘we are an exceptional people [un peuple d’exception]’ (1991a: 93, 326)—but this exception indicates something more than merely historical distinctiveness of one nation from the broader set of European peoples. Rather than naming a national trait differentiating a specific nation, the exceptionality asserted by Chaadaev indicates an exception to the very structure of teleological space-time that unites self-enclosed national particularities across their differences, to the very structure, that is, of world history. It is precisely in moments when Russia and its people name the exception, the void, or nothingness—historically, morally, ontologically—that Chaadaev’s discourse attains its inventive force. Put otherwise, Chaadaev’s discourse on Russia is not a national thinking, but rather a thinking of nothingness as excluded from the historical and national ordering of humankind—an exception to the mechanisms that ensure its reproduction, accumulation, and continuity. The (radically asymmetrical) duality of nothingness and world history suggests, however, two absolutely divergent trajectories to the question of what is to be done with this non-time and non-space. The Letters proffer a conservative solution to the problem, suggesting the necessity of overwriting the exception. Within this ‘Westernizing’ solution, the term ‘Europe’ (the solid body of the European tradition) seeks to consume the term ‘Russia’ (the non-place of nothingness), so that nothingness appears as a gap or lack to be re-incorporated into the universal unfolding of history. All thinking, including the thinking of the void, remains indelibly tethered to tradition and history, ultimately ensuring their continuity and universality at the expense of the void. In contrast to the first trajectory, the second (fully expressed in Chaadaev’s subsequent Apologia of a Madman) affirms the nothingness in its immanence, as inherent to itself and detached from all (historical, ontological, and narrative) determinations that would establish it as lack. Explicitly refusing the logics of tradition, reproduction, and memory, the Apologia sees in the void a kind of liberation from tradition. ‘It should not be doubted that a great part of the universe is oppressed by their traditions, by their memories: let us not envy the constricted circle in which it flounders. Let us leave them to struggle with their inexorable past’ (1991a: 301, 535). Indeed, being liberated from the logic of tradition allows for ‘the immediate fulfilment of everything good’ out of world-historical nothingness—and this fulfilment indicates a different futurity, one that does not merely arise out of the continuity of history. ‘It is my deep conviction that we are called upon to resolve most of the problems of the social order, to accomplish most of the ideas that arose in the old societies, to decide on the most serious questions that occupy humankind’ (1991a: 300, 534). The Apologia advances a novel and antitraditionalist answer to the question ‘What is to be done with the (Russian) void?’. The task is 295

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to begin immanently from within the nothingness so as to suspend all tradition and history, and to advance a radically different logic of futurity—not a transcendent futurity, or one emerging out of a continuous process of development, but a futurity that arises as and in the (immanently real) excess of history. This future, moreover, is proposed as a common future, one that resolves all social issues by beginning from the excluded of history, from that which does not have a place or is the non-place vis-à-vis the world-historical thinking of tradition. Here, (Russian) thinking itself becomes intimately imbricated with the a-topic nothingness, out of which it emerges and which it must think. This (im)properly Russian thought, beginning with Chaadaev, is a thinking of the void, aimed at delegitimating the world as it has been created by the dominant modern logics of history and tradition. What is decisive for the trajectory of worlddelegitimation that we are constructing in this essay, is not the name ‘Russia’—but the very logic of a nothingness that is absolutely excluded from history, and the affirmation of this nothingness as the non-place of the common. In Bakunin and Fedorov, removed as their thought is conceptually from Chaadaev’s, we will encounter a convergent affirmation, and a thinking against the world-historical whole, against the very thrust of historical thinking—though not always entirely free from its lures—in a way that permutates the problematic first established by Chaadaev.

3 Unnatural humanity—or, we have never been human Mikhail Bakunin (1814–76) is commonly remembered as one of the founders of anarchism and an insurrectionary critic of the state. And while politically Bakunin certainly targets the state, his thinking is oriented around the broader concerns of transcendence and legitimation. Whereas the state is founded on acts of force, it is religion that essentially enacts legitimation. As Bakunin explains in his Letters to the Comrades of the International Workingmen’s Association of Locle and Chaux-de-Fonds (commonly referred to as Letters on Patriotism) from 1869, religion ‘has always sanctified violence and transformed it into right’ (1895: 220).4 Indeed, Bakunin might well be considered the first critical antagonist of political-theological thinking in modernity, a thinker who construes the state and religion, their essences and operations, as partaking in a single, unified, bimodal machine of transcendence.5 His thinking throughout, but especially starting with his middle period, takes this nexus as the target of savage polemics, and becomes a thinking seeking to delegitimate its sanctification and the force of its authority. This is something that was soberly identified by Carl Schmitt, who saw in Bakunin the culmination of a radical position that fought against transcendence upheld by the political-theological tradition of counterrevolutionary thought, of which Schmitt considered himself the heir. Let us call to mind the portrait of Bakunin that Schmitt offers in his Political Theology: Bakunin was the first to give the struggle against theology the complete consistency of an absolute naturalism […] Bakunin’s intellectual significance rests, nevertheless, on his conception of life, which on the basis of its natural rightness produces the correct forms by itself from itself. For him, therefore, there was nothing negative and evil except the theological doctrine of God and sin, which stamps man as a villain in order to provide a pretext for domination and the hunger for power. All moral valuations lead to theology and to an authority that artificially imposes an alien or extrinsic ‘ought’ on the natural and intrinsic truth and beauty of human life. The sources of such authority are greed and lust for power, and these result in a general corruption of those who exercise power as well as those over whom it is exercised. (1985: 64)

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Bakunin is presented as a proponent of naturalism, which takes nature as good and to be affirmed in its immanence, in opposition to the deforming transcendence of God and the state. At stake, however, is not only nature as such, but human nature in particular: Schmitt draws a stark distinction between the political and theological (and ultimately, political-theological) thinking that takes man as essentially fallen and evil, a fact that necessitates and renders legitimate authority and order, and the tradition of thought, purportedly embodied by Bakunin, which takes human nature as essentially good (Schmitt 1985: 50, 55). Bakunin does in fact repeatedly delineate the contours—and shows himself a fiery enemy—of the tradition of metaphysicians, theologians, and politicians who justify authority by appealing to human sinfulness and wickedness. Yet the status of the position ascribed to him by Schmitt regarding the natural goodness of the human turns out to be, when one returns to Bakunin’s texts, more complex than may have been expected. Bakunin is certainly a naturalist in the broad sense insofar as he theoretically grounds the human in nature, rather than in a divine origin or in narratives of creation and fall. But this natural origin of the human, this grounding of human in nature, engenders the most bewildering of fascinations. Repeatedly in Bakunin’s works, the point at which nature and the human coincide is identified with cannibalism [l’anthropophagie]: ‘Human societies, do they not begin through cannibalism?’ (1895: 230); and again: ‘At the cradle of human civilization, we find cannibalism’ (1895: 254). The same concern comes up in his more famous God and the State: ‘What is more ancient and more universal than slavery? Cannibalism perhaps’ (1970: 20).6 Though tracing the natural origin of the human, Bakunin hardly assumes nature to be innocent or good; rather, it is defined by a kind of mutual devouring, which resembles a combination and intensification of the visions of Darwin and Hobbes. This natural war of all against all, at the moment of conjunction with the development of human history, becomes specifically human, and thus can take on the name cannibalism. For, ‘the natural world is nothing but a bloody hecatomb, a dismal and frightening tragedy written with hunger’ (Bakunin 1895: 248)—and the natural origins of the human are to be found therein. Bakunin names this mutual devouring, this logic of slaughter and violence in the natural world, in an unexpected theoretical gesture, patriotism. In other words, he grounds patriotism in nature itself, as a natural passion, indeed an excessively natural [trop naturelle] one. Although it was ‘man the speaking being [that] finally introduced the first word [phrase] into this struggle—and this word is patriotism’, as a phenomenon, patriotism is grounded in the natural animal and plant world by means of two principles, those of nourishment and reproduction (Bakunin 1895: 229–30). Whereas nourishment concerns the conservation of the individual, reproduction concerns the constitution and perpetuation of families, groups, and species. They delimit, on two different levels, that of individuality and collectivity, the operations of the proper. Reproduction in particular, insofar as it defines the limits of a group, draws the line of demarcation between what is same and what is other. As Bakunin writes, it differentiates ‘the great fatherland [la grande patrie]’ from ‘an absolutely strange world, hostile and condemned to destruction’ (1895: 231–32); or again, ‘It is the love of who and what is one’s own [des siens et du sien] and hatred of everything that bears a foreign character [étranger]. Patriotism is thus a collective egoism, on one side, and war, on the other’ (1895: 234). Although the patriotism of historical societies and political formations will add additional economic, political, and religious elements, such additions will never revoke its natural grounding, which acts to constitute the proper and the particular, whose very reproduction inevitably engenders violence and warfare. The logic of reproduction that allows for the proper and the particular to persist across generations, then, is a logic that underlies equally the natural world and the realm of human history. 297

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Cannibalism is the point of conjunction between the history of humankind and the natural world of animality. It is a kind of root out of which human history, as a history of violence and domination, grows. Bakunin’s naturalism produces a certain continuity, in which the violence indexed by cannibalism persists in mutated forms across world history. As he notes: Human beings, omnivorous animals par excellence, began their history through cannibalism [anthropophagie]. Today they tend towards universal association […] But between these two terms, what bloody and horrible tragedy! And we have not yet finished with this tragedy. After cannibalism came slavery, after slavery serfdom, after serfdom wage-labour, after which first the terrible day of justice is to follow, and later, much later, the era of fraternity. These are the phases through which the animal struggle for life is transformed gradually, in history, into the human organization of life. (1895, 219–220) Insofar as the logic of patriotism is deemed natural—this is the core of Bakunin’s surprising theoretical manoeuvre in the Letters on Patriotism—and ultimately spans across the natural world and the world-historical development of humankind, we might say that nature and the transcendent apparatus of state and religion are conjoined. The latter does not break with the violent logic of the former. Rather, we see the violence of the natural world mutating across the world history in a series of ‘phases’. This is hardly the portrait of naturalism that we saw alluded to in Schmitt’s characterization of Bakunin. Indeed, as Bakunin writes: ‘It is clear that, up to the current moment at least, humanity has not been an exception to the general law of animality that condemns all living beings to devour each other to live’ (1985: 256). There has not been any exception to the general law of speciation and reproduction, no discontinuity with the history that has been produced continually up to the present. Whatever is to be freed from this, as an exception—‘the era of fraternity […] the human organization of life’—has never yet occurred. Nature has been a bloody struggle, and we have never properly escaped it. At the same time, the gradualism of the stages or ‘phases’ of history—spanning from cannibalism to wage labour to the day of justice—carries with it the suggestion that the time of history is a time of amelioration, of gradual transformation. History appears as the process of humanization, the actualization of freedom, whose full form is still to come. We are confronted by a strange contradiction or ambivalence here: the trenchant antagonist of political-theological thinking, whose very orientation seeks to delegitimate the authority of the state and religion, is delineating a logic that justifies and legitimates the process of history, and thus the violence and transcendence that are an essential part of it. And this legitimating trajectory within Bakunin’s thought appears in his other works, as well. In his Federalism, Socialism, and Antitheologism of 1867, we read the following: ‘The entire history of man is thus nothing but his progressive separation from pure animality through the creation of his humanity’ (1895: 85). The justificatory tendencies within this work go so deep that the radical atheist Bakunin will judge religion a ‘historical necessity’—humanity’s first and partial attempt of self-discovery (Bakunin 1895: 133). If in the Letters on Patriotism, patriotism is positioned as a natural phenomenon, in Federalism, Socialism, and Antitheologism, it is religion that is explored as one. In the latter work, nature is taken as omnipotent, generating in natural beings a state of ‘absolute dependence’ permeated by ‘fear’, with no autonomy or independence possible. Here again, the human is grounded in nature; but in this case, it is thought itself, understood as the fundamental faculty of abstraction, that marks the genesis of the distinctly human. This faculty of abstraction is a capacity of elevation and transcendence, which allows for a separation from natural immediacy: the human is at once 298

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continuous with nature, as a natural being, and discontinuous with it insofar as it exhibits the capacity to abstract from the ineluctable pressures of the natural world. Bakunin’s discussion of abstraction takes place amidst a speculative reconstruction of the origins of religion (a dubious methodological undertaking which exhibits Bakunin’s Enlightenment inheritance): ‘What is the real essence of all religion? It is precisely this sentiment of absolute dependence of the momentary individual vis-à-vis eternal and omnipotent nature’ (1895: 98). The feeling of absolute dependence is natural, but by means of abstraction, it becomes conscious and, thus, religion. Indeed, this originary operation yields, as its first result, ‘the absolute abstraction’—God (1895: 121); and this God is judged to be ‘a necessary error in the development of humanity’ (1895: 86). Religion as a whole is justified as the originary step from animality to humanity: ‘Through religion, the animal man, by exiting its bestiality, takes a first step towards humanity; but as long as it remains religious, it will never attain its goal’ (Bakunin 1895: 134). In fact, Bakunin traces how the operations of abstraction result in and legitimate the very modes of political-theological transcendence that come to dominate the human across history. Abstraction names the point that distinguishes, while conjoining, the natural and the human, thereby opening up the developmental path of history: the gradual historical process of the emancipation of humankind begins in the original (dis)continuity of abstraction and ensues by means of labour that transforms the natural world. That is to say, although abstraction is presented as what distinguishes the human from the purely natural, in a more profound sense, it also conjoins nature and history into one mechanism. And, it is this very apparatus of the natural and of the abstract that institutes the field of human history as what is necessary and legitimate. If, in the Letters on Patriotism, it is cannibalism that is the point of conjuncture of nature and history, in Federalism, Socialism, and Antitheologism, it is abstraction that does that work. The field of history opened by abstraction becomes at once ‘a work of intellectual and moral development’ and ‘a work of material emancipation’ (Bakunin 1895:110). Freedom is something achieved by means of an activity of conquest and domination across history, in which the wilderness of the earth is transformed into a human world.7 ‘Man produces [the human world] by conquering, step by step, his liberty and human dignity, over and beyond the exterior world and his own bestiality’ (Bakunin 1895: 106). Rejecting the Rousseauian vision of freedom as located at the natural origin of history, Bakunin asserts freedom as the telos of history, to which the human inclines once it begins to transform the world according to its own image. If, in the Letters on Patriotism, we have never been fully human because we have always remained too natural, here, amidst a discourse that justifies history, we likewise encounter an ambiguity in the status of the human. ‘Man does not really become man, he does not conquer the possibility of his development and his interior perfectibility except under the condition of having broken, to a certain extent at least, the chains of the slave that nature imposes on all its children’ (Bakunin 1895: 110). Becoming human entails not the affirmation of nature against the theo-political abstractions of transcendence, but rather breaking with the entire conjoined apparatus of nature and history. Whatever the original discontinuity (produced by abstraction) between history and nature, up to this point in history, there has been only a more profound continuity between the two, a continuity that includes the political-theological apparatus of transcendence that has persisted across and governed history. This continuity must be subverted, if the human is ever to be ‘really’ human—an assertion of radical discontinuity that has not yet occurred. And, as long as the human functions through or as the conjunction of nature and history, it is imbricated in violence and transcendence, while the goal—of freedom, of being really human, of universal association—remains unattainable. In other words, within Bakunin’s problematic two trajectories may be discerned: a legitimating one, which justifies the necessity of history as the process of development of the human towards freedom, and a more 299

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radical one, which makes manifest a profound continuity between nature and history in order to unground the violent operations that span across their putative difference. To stay true to the delegitimating orientation, one cannot merely affirm nature against alienating transcendence (as Schmitt characterized Bakunin as doing), but one must diagnose the conjunction of nature and history as what must be ungrounded in its entirety, by affirming that we have never been fully human. And though there is an axiomatically-affirmed methodological naturalism that occurs earlier in the work—one that diagnoses a universality solidarity of life and an open-ended perpetual creation (Bakunin 1895: 89–90)—this affirmation stands at a distinct tension with the natural-historical nexus of transcendence that is never that of solidarity, but only of violence and abstraction. To remain faithful to the delegitimating trajectory, Bakunin’s thinking must not be reduced to a justification of the logic of violence and reproduction that sutures nature and history (as found in Letters on Patriotism) or the logic of work and domination (as found in Federalism, Socialism, and Antitheologism). To return to the logic and language of the former work, we might say that the exception—whatever names it takes in Bakunin’s thinking, from socialism to anarchism—replaces the violence and competition of patriotism with universal association, a universality not of the proper, but of the absolutely common. Elevating justice, it would arrest ‘these brutal manifestations of human animality’ (Bakunin 1985: 256). But this exception has not—and cannot—emerge from nature and history, which only extend the cycle of violence. Rather, it must emerge from what is radically discontinuous with the natural and historical logic of particularity. There is nowhere to begin, as it were, except from an absolute futurity that would be decoupled from the continuity of particularity and violence and from the mutation of cannibalism across its historical forms. In this way, humanity would not reproduce what is one’s own in a patriotic antagonism to what is other. Instead, there emerges the surprising image of an unnatural humanity—the really human and the justly human as decoupled from nature, suspending the historical logic of reproduction to reveal a universality not as the structured totality of particularities, but as the absolutely in-common, dispossessed of the natural and mediated attachments to determinate modes of life in opposition to all that is foreign. In contrast to the natural-historical love of particularity, Bakunin, at his most radical and subversive, could be read, we suggest, as proposing a common, revolutionary task against the amalgam of nature and history, a task that links an absolute futurity with certain tendencies in the present—a revolutionary political nowness serving to break the violent subjugation imposed by the political theology of transcendence. The common cannot be inscribed into the logic of history; it can only be thought, and thus thought itself must begin, by way of a total ungrounding of the world-historical process, so as not to fall into the logic of justification.

4 Immanent resurrection (from the ashes of the common) In Nikolai Fedorov (1829–1903), the founder of so-called Russian Cosmism,8 the thinking of the common as an ungrounding of world history becomes biopolitical and cosmic in scope. Against the conjunction of nature and history—as inherently violent, as oscillating between extermination and guilt, and as leaving endless death and victims in its wake—Fedorov posits the cosmic void, the still expanse of the universe to be inhabited in-common, in an un-natural existence that would be consubstantial with the universe and in which all death, strife, and hunger would cease. A Russian Orthodox thinker with Gnostic undertones, Fedorov seeks in this way to think a resurrection that would be immanent and not transcendent, one that would abolish death in this world, and not in a world beyond—whereby, however, the amalgam of

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nature and history that we are used to calling the world would be abolished, in an immanence of ‘the purest (immortal) bliss’ (1995: I/59).9 For Fedorov, there is an isomorphism—and a complicity—between nature, this ‘deathbearing force’ (1995: I/40) and history. In nature as in history, in a manner not dissimilar to the logic of cannibalism in Bakunin, the processes of nourishment and reproduction serve division, exploitation, and strife. In this joint natural-historical logic, some toil and die, get exploited and killed, so that others can live. This world not only leaves death in its wake—it is constitutively structured by death. Death is the force that across nature and history perpetuates division and forecloses the common. Fedorov takes issue not only with violent deaths, colonialism, war, or famine—even though nature and history have, for him, functioned through this kind of violence, exacerbated in modernity on an industrial scale. For Fedorov, the issue lies deeper: in the very (reproductive and assimilative) cycle of life and death, and thus in all biological death, no matter how peaceful. Death as such marks the dead as the victims and the exploited of history, insofar as it is our death that makes possible the life of our descendants. Death is thereby justified (and we are sacrificed) for the sake of (future) life—just as the death of our ancestors served the purpose of making our current life possible. The logic of reproductive futurity, cutting across the nature-history divide, is inherently violent—and the fact that we are accustomed to seeing this violence as natural and inevitable constitutes part of the problem. To de-naturalize this violence is to acknowledge it as sacrificial, justificatory, and transcendent, as sacrificing the dead for the sake of the living and building life on top of their ashes. ‘The central contradiction of human nature [is that] the birth of the sons is the death of the fathers’, as Fedorov puts it in his sprawling The Question of Fraternity (1995: I/159). This contradiction serves fundamentally to unground any pretensions of equality or fraternity in the present, insofar as (or as long as) these can only hold among the living. Historical reproduction and biological reproduction work together, and as long as the violence of death continues, history goes on to be the succession of generations sacrificed for the sake of a future they constitutively cannot inherit. This creates the ultimate inequality—between the living and the dead—foreclosing any real enactment of the common. It is this shared natural-historical obliviousness towards the dead that allows Fedorov to use ‘natural’, ‘progressive’, and ‘violent’ in the same breath, opposing them to the common (1995: I/153), or to think together nature and war or sexual drive and industrial development (1995: I/159). Modernity represents for him the highest intensification of war and industry—and even though Fedorov considers contemporary socialism to be too progressivist, the emergence and spread of socialism points for him to the fact that the idea of the common is needed now more urgently than ever before. However, there can be no true equality and fraternity, and no true common, unless they can encompass the dead. One’s mortality is one’s ‘natural poverty’ (1995: I/149): an inequality in the face of history and progress, whose abolition must go hand in hand with, and even serve as the precondition of, the abolition of social inequality or class struggle. ‘Until … all are united in the common goal, there will always be one part [of society or humanity], one class, turning another part, or another class, into an instrument, with struggle arising as a result …’ (1995: I/166). This common goal—or ‘common task’, Fedorov’s central name for his entire thinking—can only consist in a community, and communion, of the living with the (resurrected) dead. At this point, the thinking of the common as something that has so far had no real place in history except as an idea or a striving—a key point to which we will return below—turns in Fedorov into the thinking of what he terms real or immanent resurrection. Despite the centrality of death for his thought, Fedorov’s is not a philosophy of finitude—or a philosophy of life in any standard sense. It is a philosophy of radical immanence, free of all transcendence, including that of death. ‘From transcendent resurrection to immanent resurrection’ 301

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(1995: I/226): such is the move that must be made—from the Christian idea of an otherworldly resurrection to the enactment of a materially common existence stripped of the power of death. The very logic of succession, as constitutive of the violence of the world, must be abolished. Seeing as, within the natural-historical logic, ‘the older generation’ is inevitably ‘supplanted by the younger’ (1995: I/45), to think the common is to think the cessation of reproduction, and thus of the succession of generations itself (1997: III/346). ‘What used to be succession (history), must become simultaneity’ (1997: III/365). In place of the temporality of finitude as the time of (sacrificial) death, the atemporality of immanent resurrection must be affirmed in and as the common task. The common task entails not so much an emptying out of history as its oversaturation: a fullness of life that precludes any further production or reproduction. This means, however, that the resurrected life cannot be life as we know it, or part of the life-death binary. It is a state of utter immanence, without the transcendence and violence introduced by death—and thus without any ‘natural’ givenness, insofar as nature is itself beholden to this binary. It is, so to speak, an utterly unnatural life. As such, it cannot constitute a mere repetition or continuation of what used to be. If resurrected life is the real life, and if our natural-historical life has only served death, that means we have never been alive. ‘We require’, writes Fedorov, ‘not merely a restoration of what is gone, we require resurrection’ (1995: I/281). The common task must be thought as proceeding not from a purported origin from which history might be seen as having departed or fallen away—but from something that has never taken place, in nature or in history. The non-place of the common task is also what defines for Fedorov the true beginning of thought. Thought must for him proceed not from the question of why there is something rather than nothing (‘why does the existing exist?’)—a question of sufficient reason and world-justification—but the question of death (‘why does the living die?’ [1997: III/301]). To the theodical question, ‘Why does the world lie in evil?’ (1997: III/367), Fedorov answers not by seeking to justify this evil or to explain it away as something inessential. On the contrary, death, violence, and the spectres of the dead whose ashes sustain us are precisely what is the most essential and what we all have in common—we, who are always already sacrificed to history through the mere fact of our birth. In fact, ‘Why does the world lie in evil?’ constitutes for Fedorov an apocalyptic and Gnostic line of questioning, informed by a catastrophic sentiment of a planet that is being depleted and a world that is already ending—a sentiment at once registering the crisis of modern progressivist futurity and putting it in a more-than-global, (literally) universal or cosmic perspective: Our sun, too, is dimming, even if slowly, and we are right to say not only that there will come a time when it will cease to give off light entirely, but that it is already coming ‘and now is’ [ John 5:25]. The death of the stars (sudden or slow) provides an instructive example for us, an ominous warning; the exhaustion of the earth, the eradication of the forests, the perversion of the meteoritic process manifesting itself in floods and droughts—all of that attests that there will be ‘famines and pestilences’ [Matthew 24:7] … But also, other than its slowly, gradually coming end, we cannot be certain that the earth, this grain of sand in the universe, does not succumb to a sudden catastrophe… Does one not hear in this the ominous ‘know neither the day nor the hour’ [Matthew 25:13], and should this not spur us to an even greater vigil and labour, so as to exit this agonizing uncertainty? Thus, the world is approaching its end, and the human, by its activity, is expediting the end—for a civilization that exploits but does not restore cannot have any result other than the acceleration of the end. (1995: I/196–97)

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To accelerate the end, without the thinking of immanent resurrection, is to absolutize death and transcendence. Instead, on a planetary and cosmic scale, the ashes (of our planet and all dying worlds) are the assumption from which thought must proceed—the only assumption that, as it were, undoes the world and absolutely ungrounds it, joining us immediately with and in the common task. The point of asking ‘Why does the world lie in evil?’ is not to justify evil, but to undo or counteract it with a oneness of thought and action that would proceed immanently from death, suffering, and the end of the world as what we all have in common. In his idea of the common task as simultaneously the beginning of thought, Fedorov calls for a transformation of both thinking and action (‘labour’) via the non-place of the common. The common task entails, for him, consciousness of the dead—of ‘the life they have given over to us and the ashes left by them and returned to the earth’ (1995: I/177). True consciousness must, as it were, remain immanently in death without, however, making death into a telos. To recognize the common task as rooted in the commonality of suffering and death (I/185) is also to demand the real, and really universal, equality, on which death can no longer impose itself. For Fedorov, thought as such is transformed by proceeding from the non-place of death, extermination, and ashes as what we have in common: ‘As long as strife continues to exist, if we take thought to be inseparable from action […] then “to be cognizant of” cannot but mean “to supplant”, “to exterminate”’ (1995: I/149). Modern consciousness, including the consciousness of modern philosophy, is fundamentally dividing and exterminating. There is truth in this consciousness, too, insofar as it reflects the (divided, violent) condition of the world—the condition of colonial expansion and extermination as well as class division and industrial exploitation (1995: I/183).10 Accordingly, the undoing of this condition and the enactment of a consciousness that would be a consciousness of the common and not of division and extermination go necessarily hand in hand. That is why it is so important not to cover death over with (an illusion of) life, not to obfuscate death or impose a transcendence on the immanence of the ashes and the void by turning death into a transcendent, ineliminable, sovereign authority. The common task entails an immanence of death, too, not just of resurrection (1995: I/195). In the radical immanence of the common task, death (as what the common task proceeds from) and resurrection (as what it is directed at) may be said to coincide. Resurrection is for Fedorov literal and material. It is, in his words, a project: ‘Immortality cannot in truth be considered solely subjective or objective; it is projective’ (1995: I/195). For Fedorov, the more technical term ‘project’ emphasizes that thought and action, critique and labor, subjectivity and objectivity, coincide in the common task. ‘[F]aith and critique can find their reconciliation only as project, because although, for project, immortality is not a fact, as it is for faith, it is also not a [mere] thought, as it is for critique; as project, immortality is the hypothesis enacted in resurrection’ (1995: I/195). The project or task of resurrection begins with what history treats as nothing, with the void that history leaves behind, so as to locate in this nothingness a real force capable of overturning history. This void is furthermore identified by Fedorov—and this is why his thinking is cosmist—with the cosmic void, the expanse of the universe; the ashes of history with cosmic dust. As history destroys its victims, as the living dies, it becomes one with the immanence of the universe—the ashes of the dead become one with cosmic dust and cosmic rays. It is at this zero-level of the Real, at which the earth, its nature and its history are constituted, but which at once precedes and exceeds all natural-historical life—at this particle-level, as it were—that life must be re-constituted, re-built from the ground up. Fedorov’s projective thinking treats the world as mere material (‘merely an ensemble of means’, [1995: I/195]), to be immanently reconfigured in the common task. Nature, too, must be undone as a death-bearing force, and merge with the common resurrected life—so that, against the modern idea of an external mastery of nature,

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Fedorov puts forward the project of an immanent inhabitation and steering of the universe once all (re-)production has ceased (see e.g., 1995: I/39–42).11 Russia is supposed to have a special non-place in this project—a point that connects Fedorov to Chaadaev. Even Fedorov’s polemical insistence that Russia should not be considered an exception to the logic of the peoples or the world-historical family (1995: I/200), directed as it is clearly (if implicitly) against Chaadaev, conceals a more fundamental affinity in their thinking of nothingness and history. Not unlike Chaadaev, Fedorov identifies the Russian terra nullius as that which remains still vis-à-vis history, so as to affirm this stillness—not merely as backwardness, but as an atemporal principle that escapes, and can serve to unground, the logic of history. If history, human and natural, is what propels itself forward through strife and death—what erects its progress on the ashes of human generations and the ashes of the planet—then Russia’s ‘thousandyear stagnation’ coincides for Fedorov symbolically with these ashes, or with the void of suffering and death on which history is imposed and which it leaves in its wake. These ashes form the black soil on which the Russian peasant labours, a blackness associated by Fedorov with Russia itself: ‘What is civilization’, he asks, ‘i.e., Western Europe […], other than the exploitation of nature by the hands of the exploited labourer peoples (чернорабочие народы; literally: black-labourer peoples) such as Russia?’ (1995: I/197). Russia must embrace what Fedorov sees as an existence of nonviolence, suffering, and ‘black labour’. In its ‘ascetic vigil’, its ‘unsurveyable expanse’, and its ‘solitary wilderness’ (1995: I/200), Russian existence is more atemporal and ahistorical than progressive. Russia’s vigilant stillness and endless expanse coincide with the stillness and expanse of a universe seen not as a threat, but as the non-place of an immanent inhabitation in common, without violence and death. But even though Fedorov desires Russia to take up the project of the common task as its own, and sees in the Russian (absence of) historical development all prerequisites for such a role, the future still remains for him crucially undecided and uncertain—hence his obsessive interest, throughout his writings, in contemporary geopolitical developments around the globe. World history is for him the site of struggle and division, with the common representing but one tendency within this struggle, one that has so far mostly been faint and unconscious, but one that must win if the transcendence of death is to be overcome. One can see the tension between Fedorov’s desire for the triumph of the common task of resurrection and his anxiety over its actual historical prospects reflected in his fundamental ambivalence towards history. Fedorov tends to alternate between an investment in a providential philosophy of history, on the one hand, in which he sees humanity advancing, even if in fits and starts, towards the idea of the common, and a Gnostic refusal of any faith in the world and its history, on the other. Sometimes, he is at pains to construct a providential narrative and a philosophy of history of his own (see e.g., 1995: I/155–169)—and yet, ultimately, he distrusts history too much to rely on providence. Things might have been otherwise and still might be. History is mostly full of errors and movements of division and strife that are just as meaningless as they are devastating, testifying to the blind natural force at work in it (e.g., 1995: I/180–81). Thus, the movement of European colonialism was for Fedorov the highest ‘perversion’ of the common and the collective (1995: I/150; cf. 1995: I/183). There was no higher necessity to this movement, and no progress in it towards the common task. In fact, ‘those trying to assure that humanity is on its own headed towards progress are the true blight on humanity. Even if humanity has been heading towards universal resurrection up to this point unconsciously, it cannot reach it in this way’ (1995: I/197). Ultimately, Fedorov rejects the providential (or Hegelian) idea of world-history as theodicy. If there is a providence, it has only worked in history yet against it—against the death-bearing and death-dealing amalgam of nature and history. The fact that history is ruled by the same blind force as nature renders 304

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fundamentally uncertain any appeal to divine providence. The future cannot be left to providence; it is for Fedorov still completely uncertain how history will go if left to its own devices—in fact, sometimes it sounds like providence on its own is bound to fail (e.g., I/ 165, 169) unless it becomes the common task. The project of the common task is, however, what has been as such absent in history. Therefore, the future can only be thought providentially on the condition of the real enactment of the common task, and not the other way around. What ultimately prevails in Fedorov’s thinking is the sense of the world as accelerating towards a catastrophe—the sense of the historical precarity of the common, which must be rescued from and affirmed against the nature/history conjunction.

5 Conclusion The speculative trajectory of Russian thought we have sketched in this essay shares a set of distinctive elements. At its most radical, it affirms a sense of the irreducible, impossible yet real non-place of thinking—an affirmation of a world-historical void that engulfs thought and from which thought must proceed if there is to be a future-in-common free of the violent divisions and transcendences imposed by the world. Yet as each of the three figures illustrate, one also detects a theoretical ambivalence at the heart of this trajectory—a hesitation that arises from reliance on the more traditional logics of justification of the (Christian-modern) world and its history. While inheriting idealist and providential philosophies of history, nineteenth-century Russian thought at its most speculative opens up a void that serves to de-absolutize and unground them, ungrounding thereby as well the fundamental logics of the modern world. We have attempted here to reconstruct this tension, while emphasizing the unique ways that, turning against history in its imbrication with nature and providence, Chaadaev, Bakunin, and Fedorov gave voice to a thought of delegitimation as a way of articulating a justice against the world as it is.

Notes 1 Kirill Chepurin’s work on this article was supported by the Russian Science Foundation under grant no. 19-18-00100. 2 The following section draws directly from our previously published work on Chaadaev: Chepurin and Dubilet (2019a) and Chepurin and Dubilet (2019b). 3 All translations into English are our own; we have, however, consulted two extant translations (Chaadaev 1966; Chaadaev 1991b). 4 Unless otherwise noted, translations are our own. 5 Another nineteenth-century articulation of such a machine is found in the work of the early Marx. For a convergent articulation of this, see Dubilet (2021). 6 We want to thank Andrea Gadberry for first bringing to our attention the role of cannibalism in Bakunin’s writings. 7 It is this dimension that accounts for the lack of any kind of decolonial reflections in Bakunin—a fact especially visible in his consideration of the United States as a political entity. 8 More generally on Russian cosmism, see Groys (2018). 9 All translations are our own. That Fedorov thinks bliss (блаженство) as annihilative of world-history, is more than a mere index of his Christianity—it is, rather, indicative of a broader entanglement between bliss and the Christian-modern. For a convergent reading of bliss in the German Idealist philosopher F. W. J. Schelling, see Chepurin (2019). 10 This also means that modernity is for Fedorov—contra the common identification of modernity with immanence—an epoch of transcendence, not immanence. On modernity as transcendence, see relatedly Chepurin and Dubilet (2021) and Albernaz and Chepurin (2020). 11 At the same time, the very use of the terms ‘labour’ and ‘project’ indexes the constitutive entanglement of Fedorov’s thinking with modernity, even as he seeks to unground it. We hope to pursue this line of questioning more fully in our future work on Fedorov.

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References Albernaz, J. and K. Chepurin (2020) The Sovereignty of the World: Towards a Political Theology of Modernity (after Blumenberg), in A. Bielik-Robson and D. Whistler (eds.), Interrogating Modernity: Debates with Hans Blumenberg, New York: Palgrave Macmillan: 83–107. Bakunin, M. (1895) Œuvres: Fédéralisme, Socialisme et Antithéologisme; Lettres sur le Patriotisme; Dieu et L’État, Paris: Tresse and Stock. Bakunin, M. (1970) God and the State, New York: Dover. Chaadaev, P. (1966) Letters on the Philosophy of History: First Letter, in V. Snow (trans.), M. Raeff (ed.), Russian Intellectual History: An Anthology, New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 160–173. Chaadaev, P. (1991a) Polnoe sobranie sochineniy i izbrannye pis’ma. Toma 1 i 2, Moscow: Nauka. Chaadaev, P. (1991b) Philosophical Works of Peter Chaadaev, (eds.) R. McNally and R. Tempest, Dordrecht: Springer. Chepurin, K. (2019) Indifference and the World: Schelling’s Pantheism of Bliss, Sophia 58.4: 613–630. Chepurin, K. and A. Dubilet (2019a) Sovereign Nothingness: Pyotr Chaadaev’s Political Theology, Theory & Event 22.2: 243–266. Chepurin, K. and A. Dubilet (2019b) Russia’s Atopic Nothingness: Ungrounding the World-Historical Whole with Pyotr Chaadaev, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 24.6: 135–151. Chepurin, K. and A. Dubilet (2021) Introduction: Immanence, Genealogy, Delegitimation, in K. Chepurin and A. Dubilet (eds.), Nothing Absolute: German Idealism and the Question of Political Theology, New York: Fordham University Press: 1–34. Dubilet, A. (2021) On the General Secular Contradiction: Secularization, Christianity, and Political Theology, in K. Chepurin and A. Dubilet (eds.), Nothing Absolute: German Idealism and the Question of Political Theology, New York: Fordham University Press: 240–255. Fedorov, N. (1995) Sobranie sochinenii v chetyrekh tomakh, tom I, (ed.) M. Kolerov, Moscow: Progress. Fedorov, N. (1997) Sobranie sochinenii v chetyrekh tomakh, tom III, (ed.) I. Blauberg, Moscow: Traditsija. Groys, B. (ed.) (2018) Russian Cosmism, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Schmitt, C. (1985) Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, (trans.) G. Schwab, Chicago: Chicago University Press.

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22 THE DESTRUCTION OF THOUGHT Gil Anidjar

(Qur’ān 55:25) Here is a thought—to begin or end with, to hold and forever relinquish.1 Every single one of what we call acts or actions, every creation, formation, construction or production, every praxis or poiesis, every making and fashioning, every birth and generation, deed or performance could be described, nay, perceived or simply thought otherwise. Each might, as it were, come undone as it finds or loses place and function on a different continuum, along a broken trajectory, answering—or indeed not answering—to an alternative logic or lack thereof. Each of these acts or products a mere side effect, a collateral windfall, in any case, a provisional or randomly recurring consequence of something which I shall refrain from calling an act, a doing or a deed, much less a potentiality, a capacity, or ability, or an intention. Besides, what is at play here—emphatically not at work—does not require, in fact, often greatly precedes and exceeds, a human actor (though humans have often had quite a hand in it). Such a thought is not meant to rise to the level of a hypothesis. It corresponds rather to a fragile and fleeting exercise in perspective, a minor but necessary adjustment toward radical and forceful transience. Let us call it, after Karmen MacKendrick, a ‘destructive invitation’. (2001: 22)2 For it is of destruction that I write (and not yet, or no longer, of nihilism, nor necessarily of destructiveness), of consumption and of corruption, of degeneration and putrefaction, decay and disintegration, of devastation and annihilation, extermination and extinction. In no particular disorder. You could say that I am trying to alter the narrative, philosophical, historical or what have you. I do not seek to replace or reverse it, only to shift the angle and supplement it with, or as, a mere point, an ambiguous vanishing point (which is not simply an end point), the sense of an ambiguity that was always already (not) there and that, disorderly, pushes at once against, toward and beyond somber alternatives, hovering above an unstable background or outcome (‘things fall apart’, Yeats and Achebe have reminded us accurately enough), along intermediary and differentially devastating steps.3 Unsure of my grasp, I aim to attend to cognitive limits, conditions of impossibility, at the very least to the limits of narrative. But what ‘I’ would not irremediably fail confronted with the suspension of narrative, there where, in media res, destruction arrests everything and nothing follows any longer, where what happens is nothing ever after (less paradoxical than it seems, the French word ‘rien’ notoriously derives from the Latin res).4 307

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Levity is, one would think, inappropriate, given the subject—or object. Not to mention the hour. Yet is there not something comical in the one-sided way we persist in endowing ourselves (and sometimes others) with more powers and capacities, tell ourselves the stories of our great deeds, sing the glorious or tenacious praises of our productive and creative abilities, the wisdom (and, more often, unwisdom) with which we continue ‘making our own history’?5 Insisting that things make sense (or that they will), we clamor for more, more doing—Just Do It!6 And we maintain, with indefatigable attachment to subject formation and to agency and activism, to social constructions and to ubiquitous performances, that the time to act is NOW.7 And no doubt it is. It remains untimely, as it surely must, to dwell on destruction, to consider the possibility that every act and every deed, every product—every thought, too, should the latter have to be singled out and distinguished—not only involved (emerged from and resulted in) extraordinary feasts of destruction, a veritable (for once) potlatch of devastation, entropic vectors of a long-freezing universe, but also floods and fires, droughts and seismic events, as well as torture and murder, war and conquest, slavery and colonialism, capitalism and genocide.8 Or positive feedback—and the occasional meteorite or black hole (Bridle 2018: chap. 3). Nor have these merely constituted unpalatable reversals, un-doing, of what we thought (or at least said) we were part of, what we, with and without ‘our’ tools and technologies, were (along with that other busybody, nature) accomplishing.9 You could say, to remain provincially anthropocentric about it, that action and creation, and particularly of the collective kind (but what action isn’t?) have always been carrying at their core, they themselves have constituted or, as it were, deconstituted ‘the signs and seeds of destruction’ within them (it is, to repeat, not only about the way it all ends) (Antoon 2019: 300). It might be time, in any case, to recognize that every molecule of microplastics ever made with our techno-scientifico-economical and ever so creative—I do say creative, not violent—imagination will remain, along with the radioactive waste of our ‘enriched’ uranium, our longest lasting achievements. But wait! Am I not, following some bad habit or other, ‘reifying’, ‘banalizing’, or worse ‘essentializing’ destruction? Would it not be more correct to speak, at the very least, of destructions? Before we rush to identify destruction with an object—or, for that matter, with a process—and tell its history and lack thereof, it would be wiser to consider that destruction does not abide by the rules of cognition, the divisions of knowledge and practice, the axiomatics of continuity and consistency, much less to laws of equanimous balance and stability. Destruction, if anything, dis-integrates. So go ahead. Be fruitful and multiply—destructions. It nonetheless remains the case that, unlike its easily available antonyms, from creation to production and construction, social and otherwise, destruction has hardly risen to the level of a concept or garnered much of the divided, all too one-sidedly divided, attention of major, or minor, thinkers. In what is perhaps too restricted an economy, this essay will later turn to three, albeit reluctant, exceptions: Walter Benjamin, Martin Heidegger and Georges Bataille.10 It remains nonetheless the case that, unlike production and means of production (Marx), unlike ‘making’ (Vico), ‘acting’ (Arendt) or ‘social construction’ (all together now), destruction has not quite become an explicit object of thought. But can it? Destruction has certainly been deemed a necessary moment (Hegel), it might all along have been time itself (Plato, for starters; Oppenheimer, for enders), yet no great tractate has been written about it (D’Hondt 1982: 125–37). We have some searing accounts, yes, lingering testimonies and compelling assertions of pressing, if ephemeral, concern, invocations and deployments, however partial or regional; we even have names for it (one might foreground redemption among them or, very differently, race; Maurice Blanchot names madness, or writing and, differently, the disaster),11 but no philosophy to speak of, not even a theory of, say, weapons or, more broadly, of means of destruction (Hobbes and Clausewitz dismissed any such; Engels hesitantly tried his hand at it; more recently, there 308

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emerged a necessary, if all-too precisely targeted, theorizing of the drone).12 We have no discriminating sense of the difference (if there is one, etymology notwithstanding) between offense and defence, barring the common and mistaken allegation that the best of the latter is the former (Dorlin 2017). Even our theories of power increasingly insist on the latter’s productive dimension.13 It should already be clear, though, that destruction undoes even those perspectives that are exclusively focalized on violence and war, on death and domination.14 Nor, finally, has the story of destruction (the story after the end, yes, but also the roads arrested, in and beyond all stories) been adequately told. One might say, paraphrasing Wittgenstein, that ‘if a man could write a book on [destruction] which really was a book on [destruction], this book would, with an explosion, destroy all the other books in the world’ (2014: 46, substituting ‘destruction’ for Wittgenstein’s ‘ethics’). And, Athar Jaber reminds us, not only the books.15 ∗ What, at any rate, have we been thinking? In a way, of nothing else. Which is to say: of nothing in its coming round and about: ex nihilo nihil. But more often, and for quite a while now (it was not so always and everywhere), we have been thinking—the original incitement to discourse—of destruction’s alleged opposite, which a kind of foundational dialectic has long subsumed under the symmetry of an association, the binding of a pair rendered famous—and lucrative—by Capital’s thinkers (recapitulating, Alan Liu, in a learned gesture of exquisite rarity, asserts our need for ‘a capable theory of destruction’, and goes to look for it in ‘contemporary creativity theory’).16 Yet, contrary to expectation, and to fantasies of a temple rebuilt, a new temple even (Jerusalem!), the destruction of thought—a double genitive, to signal that destruction might belong to thought, that, although the thought of destruction may yet occur to us, thought might have to claim it as its improper own—does not begin or end with the chicken and the egg (the latter a recurring symbol of creation and generation).17 I provisionally surmise, rather, that it disarticulates the omelette and the egg. It is a question of time, in other words, and in it the chicken (call it, if you will, Schrödinger’s chicken) is both alive and dead—a description made no less poignant if you have been following the lives of animals or whatever it is that we might call what ‘precedes’ their mass destruction by slaughter or by the eradication of their habitat, by extinction. Otherwise put, the destruction of thought vacillates over something like time or, rather, irreversibility. Neither full nor empty, it shatters like a broken glass along the lines of an Aristotelian, gendered, aleatory (Bianchi 2014). More than the order of narrative, it requires we recalibrate our powers of observation. Or perhaps renounce them. Recall, in any case, that no omelette has ever turned into an egg, no black dwarf into a blazing sun. Pace Aristotle (and his cyclical understanding of nature and of that ‘field of what for him may indeed act against nature [para phusin] rather than according to nature [kata phusin]’) and pretty much everyone else, becoming-nothing cannot be understood as the opposite of becoming, nor should destruction be conceived as primarily generative or creative (Bianchi 2014: 10).18 Accordingly, no egg (nor omelette) was ever ‘made’ in the time it takes to break that primordial or proverbial egg. This is to say that the time of destruction, though it may stretch for aeons (think radioactivity, or the inevitable collapse of a burning star), can always happen faster than any creation, production, construction. Other than a reversal of time’s arrow, destruction marks an asymmetry, a different time, and a different speed. To invoke a popular formula: Rome was not built in a day. It fell notably faster. Hiroshima was destroyed in seconds. In the intervals, scholars and scientists debate the duration of the K-Pg extinction event—or ‘a billion black anthropocenes’ (Yusoff 2018).19 309

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Thus, contrary to Jean-Paul Sartre’s surprising claim—one quite unprecedented in the history of philosophy, if only for the attention it devotes to destruction—destruction is not exclusively a human ‘activity’, nor is ‘man’ the only being that can apprehend it or bring it about.20 Assuming, for one, and in this particular context, that one could rely on the stability, the indestructibility, of such narrow gendered categories, women can certainly be said to have dwelled in the vicinity of destruction for interminable aeons (Simone de Beauvoir, who knew something about the force of things, quickly moved along Hegelian lines in identifying desire, male desire, as the destructive vector par excellence [de Beauvoir 1953: 159]).21 As have innumerable racialized beings—and beings as Calvin Warren recently argued (2018)—and untold natural or indeed cosmic bodies. These have been made, yes, but also unmade and it is in the asymmetric and shadowy space of that distinction that we linger. Yet everything is as if Sartre and other philosophers wanted to pre-empt George Bataille’s sense, to which I shall return, that ‘the ground we live on is little other than a field of multiple destructions’ (1988: 23). Something which modern physics, incidentally, seems peculiarly uninterested in, having otherwise accepted ‘the law of conservation of energy’.22 Did anybody say ‘entropy’?23 But our current grand (if always regional) narratives, concerned as they clearly and justifiably are with violence and suffering, leave little room for destruction, except to relegate it to the time of war, to the odd margin, the distant (but fast approaching) future, an unfortunate accident of the history we make, collateral damage or side effect (Masco 2013; Weizman 2011). I am thus not, not by any means, suggesting that we have remained unaware of destruction, that iconoclasts of all stripes, artists, creationists and unequally varied great men or mass murderers, generals, presidents, and nuclear physicists even, have refrained from advocating, indeed, promoting destruction, sometimes praying for it.24 Some are still trying to delay destruction, to outdo or outrun it with obvious obliviousness to ‘past’ destructions. To repeat, I am for my part merely wondering whether destruction has or could become a—dare I say: solid?—object or subject of thought, more than another point of suspension ‘between God and nonbeing’ (Descartes), the impossible sign of a ‘defective wisdom’ (Kant), a moment in the motion of thought (Hegel), an ambiguous, recurring if not dialectical, rallying call (Nietzsche, Fanon), a mere element, however spectacular, of a surprisingly endless story (the Big Bang)? Then again, there is ‘Climate Change’—which surely sounds less dramatic than ‘self-devouring growth’ or the destruction of ‘life as we know it’.25 As we resign ourselves to the unbearable lightness of being and nonbeing, to the fragility and vanity of all things fleeting, we have surely not failed to develop quite an inclination for ‘destructive spectatorship’, a thing of nothing that Martin Harries powerfully theorized (Harries 2007). War, torture, slavery, genocide and inhuman or nonhuman extinction events have all served as occasions to lament destruction (Sodom. Troy. Pompei. Auschwitz. Chernobyl). To practice and glorify it too, sometimes. We have, in other words, witnessed endless (and all too ending) and multiple destructions. Can we, should we, not claim destruction as our own, then? Affirm, at least, our belonging to it along with the perdurance of homo vastans and, before or beyond it, the eternal recurrence of cosmic devastation? When it comes to that—when it comes to nothing, that is—the thought of destruction has already meant the destruction of thought. What, in any case, would it mean—I can hear you wondering: ‘what would it do?’—to expose thought to destruction? To think destruction as our own, but also as that most disowning of (no)things, to redirect our senses (our existence) and ponder destruction, rather than action and production, as the beginning (middle and end) of thought, if not of wisdom? As it brushes against destruction, as it ignores and escapes (or not) destruction, does thought (of all things) remain? There is no reason to think so, which might be why there are those who have long

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found it necessary to prepare themselves, to learn, train, and educate themselves in, the annihilation of thought (Chittick 1989). Others have recognized destruction as divine (followers of Kālī and, more recently, of Walter Benjamin, to take two examples).26 They have gazed into the fleeting void that makes or breaks any simple pairing, any ‘cycle’ of creation and destruction. Aside from the Biblical YHWH, who massively simplified the divine division of labour while ambiguously offering a combination of full spectrum dominance and genocidal law, the monopoly of destruction was not secured by one and for all (Boulouque n.d.; see Stern 1991). Divinities of numerous persuasions have known and taught how to distinguish the carrot from the stick. Accordingly, scrupulous followers and exegetes of equally discriminating wisdom could go on to debate the finitude, rather than the eternity, of the world—or worlds.27 They saw destruction less for the bang of violence it unleashes, than for the whimper it lets resound under the world bustle and into the void. For, to repeat, destruction—on the edge of the world-picture—must not only be disentangled from creation and disambiguated therefrom, it must be acknowledged as bearing no necessary relation to violence and war. The Jewish tradition (less garrulous on God’s other promises than it might seem), in fact, teaches us that ‘only labour that is productive is prohibited on the Sabbath. If labour is destructive (meqalqel), it does not fall into the category of prohibited Sabbath labour’ (Berkowitz 2018: 52).28 From there to the notion that redemption (as the Qur’ān has it as well), and even later formulations of tiqqun colam, might translate as the final destruction of worlds, the path might be, once again, shorter. Accordingly, it would make little sense to describe the nearest supernova or high-fructose corn syrup as weapons of mass destruction. Though the devastation the latter has brought about—another sophisticated feat of chemical engineering cum governmental creativity equal only to that unleashed by the petrochemical and ‘health’ industry—is, finally, as deniable as anything. Which is surely destructive enough. ∗ It makes little sense to consider thought exposed to destruction, to interrogate destruction as an object of thought (and thought as an object, sometimes subject, of destruction), and expect the delivery—the birth—of a concept, the integrity of a concept rather than a general disintegration. And though I have so far signalled a few sites or paths, even thoughts and regions of destruction, I shall spend the remainder of this essay on a brief account (by no means an exhaustive one) of a destructive thread, destructive pointers or indeed invitations in the writings of three thinkers. Among these pointers is the notion I have already insisted upon, namely, that destruction must be disentangled from the question of war and violence. It must be considered in a different frame or perspective. Thus, Walter Benjamin (1999: 541–42) reminded us that destruction is, one could reductively say a theologico-political question, a singular form of power (Gewalt). Martin Heidegger, for his part, repeatedly mobilized a lexicon of destruction, an effort that culminated in an unprecedented typology of destruction. This was not, or not only, about technology, nor simply about Being or beings (it would therefore be equally misleading to designate Heidegger’s destructive effort as ‘ontological’). Finally, Georges Bataille offered an alternative to regional conceptions of destruction when he proposed a ‘general economy’. Bataille might be said to have initiated the displacement with which I began this essay, whereby the creation, all the way down to our proud collective productions, would appear for what it is, the mere collateral windfall of a universal destruction. But first, Benjamin. In a text that has remained seemingly inexhaustible for readers and interpreters, Benjamin (1996: 236–52) identified three kinds of Gewalten. With this word, 311

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Gewalt, he surely intended to refer to violence—as the English translation rightly has it—but also to force, power and authority, governance and even sovereignty (the German verb walten has the English verb ‘to wield’—authority or a weapon—as a cognate.29 The Yiddish exclamation ‘Gevalt!’ expands on the ambivalent matter by hinting or hitting at the receiving end, signalling surprise or alarm, sometimes fright). The first kind of Gewalt, for Benjamin, is founding or instituting, one might say, creating, as it brings about something out of nothing (the being that was having been conveniently governed or violated out of existence, but why quibble?). The second Gewalt conserves. It guards and preserves, making sure that whatever there is—persons and things, as Roman law had it—remains that way by any means necessary. With these two, Benjamin already confirmed that, as Michel Foucault would famously have it, power is coercive and repressive, on the one hand, and enabling and productive, on the other. There is, however, a third kind of Gewalt Benjamin might have called, after Kafka, the commentators’ despair. It is the destructive kind and Benjamin, remarkably, puts it in a class of its own. Benjamin called it: divine. With a little help from his warring and exterminating contemporaries, Martin Heidegger brought thought closest to destruction—political, divine, and other—offering what seems to me an unprecedented typology of destruction.30 Unbeknownst to most of his readers, and perhaps even to himself, and throughout his thinking career, Heidegger attached himself to destructions of many sorts, strangely insisting at first that Destruktion, the Latinate word he borrowed from Martin Luther and elevated to great philosophical heights, did not mean anything destructive. Luther’s usage, if nothing else, renders that claim difficult to sustain (see Crowe 2006: 44–66).31 More significant, though, is Heidegger’s continued return to the destruction of thought, destruction as a concern, perhaps a condition, of thought. Heidegger’s erstwhile teacher, Edmund Husserl, had pursued an extreme Cartesian line, offering ‘absolute consciousness as the residuum after the annihilation of the world’ (Husserl 1983: sec. 49, 109). But Heidegger was always more intent on the world-historical. And by 1949, he called on thinking, what is called thinking, to discriminate and confront destruction (Zerstörung), devastation (Verwüstung), and a third term upon which he had only recently been forced to reflect upon in a new way, namely, extermination (Vernichtung). That term had earlier been reserved for annihilation, though its genocidal sense was made more manifest in discussions of Vernichtungslager, discussions to which Heidegger infamously contributed, when he for instance chose to underscore ‘the fabrication of corpses’. Insofar as he was able to maintain his (thought and unthought) commitment to destruction, Heidegger left us in a distinct predicament, with a unique kind of provocation. For what he proposed was that devastation is ‘more’ (presumably: worse) than destruction, and it is uncannier (presumably: worse, still) than extermination. This Heidegger pronounced in 1949 (1976: 29), in lectures he did not wait to have published.32 One could be forgiven for thinking that a few more rounds of de-nazification might have helped. One could also, and more importantly, say that we are yet to take the measure of this intolerable but necessary typology. After such spectacular (if hardly noticed) failures, it is difficult to blame Georges Bataille, and least of all for the misunderstandings his own writings have occasioned. At the same time, Bataille did not make it easy—first of all for himself—as he foregrounded major, but highly (and paradoxically: easily) recognizable concepts, all-too human concepts (economy, expenditure, sacrifice) that themselves sustained key vectors and articulations of thought, a thought, I want to suggest, thoroughly preoccupied, as Marc Nichanian has shown (2016: 245–76), with the inhuman, a thought thoroughly exposed to destruction. For Bataille, the universe is spent—a notion that must be read as descriptive and prescriptive. Now, it is true that Bataille ‘discovers’ the limits of the concept (the conceit) of production, the 312

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limits of restricted economy, when he first reads Marcel Mauss on the potlatch. From there, his rethinking of economy is soundly grounded and articulated around the notion and the motion of dépense, which, according to my dictionary, designates primarily a spending that is monetary, secondarily, hydraulic, and comes to refer, figuratively, to use (of energy, for example) and more generally to expenditure. But the shift in perspective toward which I signalled earlier was initiated by Bataille in the fuller iteration of his thought, and it was of an altogether different nature, of a different measure. When Bataille writes of changing ‘the perspectives of restrictive economy to those of general economy’, he proposes a change that is meant to accomplish ‘a Copernican transformation: a reversal of thinking [la mise à l’envers de la pensée]’. (1988: 25) Such a drastic reversal is not so much anchored, much less regionally grounded, as it is defined (one might say coloured or marked) by destruction. Hardly a humanist, Bataille was undoubtedly preoccupied with life on earth. Yet, he decidedly locates this (let us say: restricted) concern in a vaster ‘frame’, which he called ‘the movement of energy on earth’ (1988: 10). Invoking the disciplines he learns from and criticizes (‘from geophysics to political economy, by way of sociology, history and biology’) and acknowledging further that ‘neither psychology nor, in general, philosophy can be considered free of this primary question of economy’, Bataille seeks to articulate a ‘general economy’ whose role he saw as ‘extending the frigid research of the sciences’. Incidentally, this extension brings both subject and object to a specific, illuminating (indeed, incandescent), point. This point, Bataille says, is ‘what inflames’, and brings to ‘ebullition’. More precisely, it brings about a shared ebullition, that is at once individual and general. For ‘the ebullition I consider, which animates the globe, is also my ebullition. Thus, the object of my research cannot be distinguished from the subject at its boiling point’.33 The global, planetary movement of energy may not yet appear in its full destructive force, but it does promise a universal incandescence. I write ‘universal’ because what Bataille is asking us to ‘recognize in the economy’ (understood, for now, in its restricted sense) is only ‘a particular aspect of terrestrial activity regarded as a cosmic phenomenon. A movement is produced on the surface of the globe that results from the circulation of energy at this point in the universe’ (1988: 20–21; emphasis added). Engaged in action and production, and in consumption too, human beings remain provincial, regional, ignorant of this much larger ‘determination’, of the ‘general determination of energy circulating in the biosphere’ (1988: 21). They ‘disregard … the material basis of [their] life’ and fail to recognize in their flurry of activity and productivity that they are pursuing nothing else than ‘the useless and infinite fulfilment of the universe’. Now, as numerous commentators have pointed out, Bataille’s energetic account foregrounds excess.34 The endless energy expended by the universe cannot be contained, it cannot be exclusively used (for growth or any other purpose). Nor can it be absorbed, much less conserved (recall Benjamin’s Gewalt): ‘it must necessarily be lost without profit; it must be spent, willingly or not, gloriously or catastrophically’. There is, in other words, a limit to growth and to production, to a productive or creative outlook. Excess, or surplus, ‘must be dissipated through deficit operations: The final dissipation cannot fail to carry out the movement that animates terrestrial energy’ (1988: 22). Bataille thus insists that the perspective he adopts (the perspective that must be adopted toward a general economy, toward an understanding of human action and production) is global and general, planetary and even cosmic. As Michael Lewis aptly writes, ‘Bataille directs our thinking to the cosmos, a cosmos in which we may think of the death of the sun and the incineration of the earth and its archives in the context of a profusion of suns, in a process of general explosion and extinction’ (2017: 274). But the economy, Bataille laments, ‘is never considered in general. The human mind reduces operations, in science as in life, to an entity based on typical particular systems (organisms or 313

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enterprises)’ (1988: 22). Surprisingly, in The Accursed Share, Bataille himself does not remain for very long at the cosmic, which is to say, universal, level. He too moves toward a particular entity, a regional system. Along with economists and technologists, he turns his attention again and again to the human being, explaining that ‘man is not just the separate being that contends with the living world and with other men for his share of resources. The general movement of exudation (of waste) of living matter impels him, and he cannot stop it’ (1988: 23). The human being thus occupies a strange, or ambiguous, place in this economy. On the one hand, he is ‘at the summit’, endowed with undisputed ‘sovereignty’. On the other hand, this lofty location and function is precisely what ‘identifies him’ with the global movement Bataille has otherwise been describing (the circulation of energy, the movement of exudation). What is clear is that whether they affirm or recognize the final dissipation, the ‘useless consumption’ of which they are unavoidably a part, human beings cannot extricate themselves from it. They can at most ignore or deny it. But their ‘denial does not alter the global movement of energy in the least: The latter cannot accumulate limitlessly in the productive forces; eventually, like a river into the sea, it is bound to escape us and be lost to us’. Bataille’s own ambivalence, the way in which he oscillates between general object (the cosmic circulation of energy) and particular subject (the human), has everything to do, I think, with the role he ascribes to knowledge and understanding. One might say: to thought. He does bring them up in their negative form (ignorance, denial, incomprehension, ebullition) and yet he insists that they do not alter the ‘final outcome’. Incomprehension does not change the final outcome in the slightest. We can ignore or forget the fact that the ground we live on is little other than a field of multiple destructions [un champ de destructions multipliées]. Our ignorance only has this incontestable effect: It causes us to undergo what we could bring about in our own way, if we understood… Above all, it consigns men and their works to catastrophic destructions. For if we do not have the force to destroy the surplus energy ourselves, it cannot be used, and, like an unbroken animal that cannot be trained, it is this energy that destroys us; it is we who pay the price of the inevitable explosion. (1988: 23–24) It seems eminently clear, therefore, that for Bataille energy spells destruction. As does thought. He offers, even foregrounds, other terms for their circulation and expenditure, and for their waste. Yet these belong to a restricted economy at the same time as they repeatedly signal a general one (a general ebullition). It remains true that, in the cosmic scheme of things, it makes little difference what we call—what we think or know as—the frame and movement, the nature of destruction. Bataille insists, in any case, that the cosmic circulation of energy, the general economy, produces no returns and is of no productive use. It is not primarily productive. In it, moreover, life, human life, occupies a very small place, and has a very small function, if any at all. Now, as Bataille makes clear by asserting his own, shared, ebullition, thought itself is carried over and away by the Copernican turn he advocates. Thus, although human beings hardly know that they are part of a larger circulation of energy, a cosmic history of destruction, the wilful, affirmative destruction they might otherwise engage in would simply partake in the inevitable (‘inéluctable’, is Bataille’s word) modulating—or not—the magnitude of the always already coming catastrophe. Everything is therefore as if Bataille, embracing like no other the thought of destruction, was nonetheless struggling with the destruction of thought. And who could blame him? There is no lesson in destruction, no apprehension. Destruction is, after all, not action, even 314

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if it may involve such. It is not (it does not inevitably turn into) production, yet such may be its collateral windfall. Destruction remains—or doesn’t—to be thought in its asymmetry from creation and production, from action. Accordingly (or perhaps: discordingly), thought is, it has always already been, taken over by destruction. In a way that is distinct from life or death (destruction is not particularly biocentric), thought belongs to destruction. Thought may or may not acknowledge that it is exposed to destruction. That there is destruction. And one might, indeed, refrain from going ontological here and say, after Heidegger’s fashion, that ‘there is’ destruction. Or that es gibt destruction. For the potlatch notwithstanding, destruction does not partake of gift giving. Emmanuel Levinas’ language might provide some assistance, reminding us that ‘il y a’—destruction. Destruction has us, one might translate, us and everything else. Destruction does not partake, therefore. If it does anything, it is to take and take apart. Destruction disintegrates. It thus infringes upon thought and upon the sciences, the theological and political sciences (Benjamin) as well as upon the physical and economical sciences (Bataille). Destruction is particular, then, regional, even. But it is also general, universal, which means, planetary and ultimately (and to begin with) cosmic, astronomic. Destruction has therefore everything (and nothing) to do with the question of being, yet we surely do well to discriminate (Heidegger). The question of destruction can perhaps only be raised if we acknowledge that, here too, ‘the question destroys itself’ (Chandler 2014: 3). Destruction is, Nahum Chandler has it in a pertinent, ebullient, context, ‘a problem for thought’. It is that and much more. Or infinitely—and paradoxically, terminally—less.

Notes 1 This iteration of what has become, for me, an extended thought exercise devoted to destruction is indebted to the comments of Mana Kia and Marc Nichanian. For a summary, see lareviewofbooks. org/article/histories-of-violence-anatomy-of-destruction/ (last accessed: December 1, 2019). 2 MacKendrick cites Maurice Blanchot’s ‘enter into the destructive element’, in The Step Not Beyond, where Blanchot testifies or acknowledges that ‘we do not write a word that does not contain this invitation and, sometimes, another that is superfluous: let you destroy yourself’ (1992: 67). 3 On the vanishing point, see Rotman (1987). Sinan Antoon offers an alternative and striking image which reminds us that, beyond their proverbial juxtaposition, death and destruction must also be rethought and disentangled. In this exchange, a character of the book, perhaps one of its authors, gathers a singular file, constructing (failing) a different and impossible archive. ‘This is the project of a lifetime’, he says, ‘an archive of the losses from war and destruction. But not soldiers or equipment. The losses that are never mentioned or seen. Not just people. Animals and plants and inanimate things and anything that can be destroyed. Minute by minute. This is the file for the first minute’ (2019: 46; emphasis added)—to be read alongside Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever (1996). 4 As Brian Cox and Andrew Cohen (2011) put it, ostensibly writing of the end of all things, ‘nothing happens, and it keeps not happening forever’. 5 I shall let this problematic ‘we’ stand exposed to destruction, provisionally posited as a subject of destruction, if there is one, while destruction undoes subjects and nonetheless implicates collectives of many kinds. 6 As Darryl Li (2020: 26) exemplarily summarizes, the debates over humanitarian intervention and terrorism lead to a limited range of responses: ‘Something must be done’ and ‘Doing nothing is not an option’. 7 The tenacious association of destruction with creation, and the related, no less insistent, claim that there is a human, all-too human propensity or capacity for destruction, runs through much psychoanalytic literature since Sabina Spielrein wrote, in 1911, about ‘Destruction as the Cause of Coming Into Being’ (1994: 155–86); Freud famously followed, but much more will have to be said elsewhere about this, about psychoanalysis and its readers from Erich Fromm, Melanie Klein and Donald Winnicott to Jacqueline Rose and Catherine Malabou. 8 On the potlatch, read the indispensable study by Christopher Bracken, The Potlatch Papers: A Colonial Case History (1997).

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Gil Anidjar 9 Eyes shut wider, Arthur Schopenhauer considers that ‘nature’s kingdom is infinite time, infinite space, and in these an infinite number of possible individuals’. As a consequence though, nature ‘is always ready to let go of the individual, which is why the individual is not only exposed to destruction in a thousand ways through the most meaningless accidents, but is even destined for destruction from the first, and is led towards destruction by nature’ (2010: 302–303). 10 Note that ‘destruction’ seems to have become an explicitly thematized concept for Benjamin alone, or at least for his readers (see Costa 2008; Seminario di studi benjaminiani 2010). 11 ‘But the madness that shatters language in leaving it apparently intact, leaves it intact only to accomplish in it its invisible destruction’ (Blanchot 1992: 46, 50; and see Blanchot 1995: 1995). In his brilliant book on race, J. Kameron Carter (2008: 92) comments on Immanuel Kant’s wish—hardly a unique one—that, except for the white race, ‘alle Rassen werden ausgerottet werden’, all races will rot or decay, they will be destroyed or annihilated, as if by their own accord Accordingly, Denise Ferreira da Silva writes of ‘a logic of obliteration’ governing race ( 2007: xl). On redemption, one might begin (or end) with Catherine Keller (2005). Michael Marder (2017: 2) suggests that we rethink ‘our fantasies of planetary destruction or salvation’. 12 See Duhem (2013: 127–65), Rabinovich (2013), and Chamayou (2015). 13 Clamoring in the desert, Mehrdad Vahabi (2004) argued for a ‘political economy of destructive power’, with little effect; see Anidjar (2019a). 14 Zainab Bahrani describes the destruction of destruction, the destruction of ruins and vestiges and more in her ‘Historical Destruction in a Forgotten War’ (in 2019: 233–47). 15 Athar Jaber’s striking engagement with destruction can be perused at atharjaber.com (accessed November 4, 2019). 16 Joseph Schumpeter rightly credits Marx for the notion of ‘creative destruction’; see Liu (2009). Returning to ‘the theme of destruction’ he had earlier written about, and before shelving it altogether, Alain Badiou expressed his regrets in having ‘maintained, back then, the idea of an essential link between destruction and novelty’ (2005: 407). Badiou is, finally, more interested in novelty, ‘intrinsic novelty’, and it has little to do with destruction. 17 In the dialectical spirit of Georg Lukács, one might argue that the destruction of thought has less to do with that which dispenses with science and with the ‘law’ of progress, less to do with the dialectical process that renders the rise of fascism and other kinds of ‘irrationalism’ possible, and more with ‘a history of the basic problems of irrationalism’, and of rationalism too, pointing therefore ‘far beyond the merely historical realm’ (Lukács, 1981: 89, 91) 18 As she describes the workings of Aristotelian nature, Bianchi explains that ‘teleological nature always acts for the sake of something or for what is better: the temporal cycles of generation and destruction observed in sublunary nature issue from and imitate the necessary cyclical motions of the heavens, which in their perfection and eternity are better, closer to the good, than the vagary-filled cycles of the sublunary, into which accident and force can intervene to cause rains in summer, and heat waves in winter’ (2014: 56). Bianchi provides a crucial series of threads toward a discriminating consideration of destruction in Aristotle, one natural and one counternatural, at once a confirmation and ‘a violent derailment from the teleological path’ (2014: 168), ‘the destruction of a thing’s very nature’ by that which ‘overthrows the active masculine power of production’ into ‘its supine and passive opposite, the female’ (2014: 209). 19 I am grateful to Winfield Goodwin for this reference. 20 ‘Man is the only being by whom a destruction can be accomplished. A geological plication, a storm do not destroy—or at least they do not destroy directly; they merely modify the distribution of masses of beings’ (Sartre 1956: 8). 21 Later, de Beauvoir writes, ‘the very use man makes of woman destroys her most precious powers’ (1953: 178), though of course, ‘woman can be a destroyer’ too (1953: 234). Betty Friedan was more graphic, I think, when she wrote of that ‘uncanny, uncomfortable insight into why a woman can so easily lose her sense of self as a housewife in certain psychological observations made of the behavior of prisoners in Nazi concentration camps. In these settings, purposely contrived for the dehumanization of man, the prisoners literally became “walking corpses”. Those who “adjusted” to the conditions of the camps surrendered their human identity and went almost indifferently to their deaths. Strangely enough, the conditions which destroyed the human identity of so many prisoners were not the torture and the brutality, but conditions similar to those which destroy the identity of the American housewife’ (Frieden 1974: 294); Friedan is explicitly drawing on Bruno Bettelheim’s work, on which see Anidjar (2019a: 144–65). 22 As Richard Sorabji puts it, ‘even nowadays, although we accept that matter can be newly created, or (as in an atomic explosion) utterly destroyed, there is still a principle of conservation of energy’ (1983: 246).

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23

24 25 26

27 28 29 30 31 32

33

34

Philip Mirowski describes the dominance of the principle of conservation in the translation of physics into economics (1989: 288), and see, for a recent engagement with this enduring, albeit troubled, perspective, Kolasi (2019: 29–46). Simon Schaffer quotes an unnamed physicist who describes entropy as ‘a principle of destruction for all creatures in the universe’ (2000: 33), but one is generally hard put to find much reflection on destruction (as opposed to transformation, dissipation, and indeed, conservation and entropy) in the accounts of the universe offered by physicists (or by economists). Michael Marder confirms that ‘physics corroborates our conclusion through the law of the conservation of energy, which, immune to destruction as much as to being-generated, is merely converted into other forms’ (Marder 2017: 4); and consider, as further illustration, the absence of a language of destruction in the work of Karen Barad or Bjørn Ekeberg. The editor of an important collection on ‘art and destruction’ aptly writes that ‘we still seem to be struggling with how to ‘frame’ destruction, insisting on a representation “proper” to it’ (Walden 2013: 7). See the discussion in the Editorial, ‘Life as We Know It’, New York Times, May 12, 2019, as well as Livingston (2019). While some scholars have read Kālī as ‘a goddess so unpredictable that she destroys her own worshippers’, she is, no doubt, more accurately described as using ‘her awesome presence and appearance to test her worshippers and prospective devotees’ (Dold 2003: 42–43); Immanuel Kant, in any case, was certainly contemplating ‘das Ende aller Dinge’, having elsewhere acknowledged ‘Rutra (otherwise known as Shiva or Shiwa)’ as ‘Judge and Destroyer of the World’ (1996: 69). On Benjamin, Costa (2011: 150–58). See, for a broad range of treatments of worlds with and without end, Rubenstein (2014). Here again, a discriminating view emerges, that ponders a creative destruction but distinguishes it from a pure or purer, an entirely purposeless, endless, that is, destructive destruction. This segment of my essay was published in earlier iterations as Anidjar (2017a) and Anidjar (2019b). What follows is a much-abbreviated summary of an argument I have tried to formulate in Anidjar (2017b). Incidentally, Sabina Spielrein also used the Latinate Destruktion, rather than Germanic alternatives. I follow Heidegger (1954: 11) in my translation: ‘Verwüstung ist mehr als Zerstörung. Verwüstung is unheimlicher als Vernichtung’. I refer, of course, to the flurry of attention that has been generated by the famous ‘black notebooks’, the publication of which Heidegger had intentionally delayed, and by earlier ‘affairs’, all preoccupied with revealing or contending with that which remained otherwise unread. The subjective or personal dimension is not to be ignored, of course. I have therefore no argument with Nick Land who, subjected as he confesses to being to ‘Bataille’s incessant je’, seems at once disgusted with the personal as he is with the impersonal: ‘It is still tempting to renounce the posture of the first person, even though its force of corrosive qualification reduces the risk of complacent objectivism or pseudo-collectivity’ (1992: xvi). Yet, if ‘the universe is energetic, and the fate inherent to energy is utter waste’, is not knowledge—and indeed thought—subjective or objective, that which comes under interrogation, that which is destroyed as well? I single out Allan Stoekl, whose Bataille’s Peak: Energy, Religion, and Postsustainability (2007) explores the many necessary questions that seem to me to define Bataille’s writing, even if what Stoekl calls ‘ethics’ remains opaque to me considering what Bataille reminds us of ‘a number of times’, namely, ‘the energy of the universe, the energy of stars and “celestial bodies” that do no work, whose fire contributes to nothing’ (xvi, and see 46). As Stoekl recognizes, the scale of destruction—inhuman, cosmic—explored by Bataille raises different questions than ethical ones (2007: 55); and compare Michael Marder who, although preoccupied with the fact that, ‘in its current form, energy production is world-destruction: it supplies the fuel for a globalized earth to go up in flames as one’ (2017: 83), reads Bataille’s expenditure without referring to its destructive force (2017: 74–77).

References Anidjar, G. (2017a) Means of Destruction, in J. Blagojević, M. Stošić, O. Fridman (eds.), #political, Belgrade: Faculty of Media and Communication, 405–412.

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Gil Anidjar Anidjar, G. (2017b) Qu’appelle-t-on destruction? Heidegger, Derrida, Montréal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal. Anidjar, G. (2019a) On the Political History of Destruction, ReOrient: The Journal of Critical Muslim Studies 4.2: 144–165. Anidjar, G. (2019b) Becoming Nothing, https://tif.ssrc.org/2017/11/15/becoming-nothing/ (last accessed on 28 November 2019). Antoon, S. (2019) The Book of Collateral Damage, (trans.) J. Wright, New Haven: Yale University Press. Badiou, A. (2005) Being and Event, (trans.) O. Feltham, London: Continuum. Bahrani, Z. (2019) Theater of Operations: The Gulf Wars 1991-2011, Long Island City: MoMA. Bataille, G. (1988) The Accursed Share: An Essay in General Economy, Vol. 1: Consumption, New York: Zone Books. Benjamin, W. (1996) Critique of Violence, in E. Jephcott (trans.), M. Bullock and M. W. Jennings (eds.), Selected Writings, Vol. 1: 1913–1926, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 236–252. Benjamin, W. (1999) The Destructive Character, in E. Jephcott (trans.), M. W. Jennings, H. Eiland and G. Smith (eds.), Selected Writings, Vol. 2.2: 1931–1934, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Berkowitz, B. A. (2018) Animals and Animality in the Babylonian Talmud, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bianchi, E. (2014) The Feminine Symptom: Aleatory Matter in the Aristotelian Cosmos, New York: Fordham University Press. Blanchot, M. (1992) The Step Not Beyond, (trans.) L. Nelson, Albany: State University of New York Press. Blanchot, M. (1995) The Writing of the Disaster, (trans.) A. Smock, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Boulouque, C. (n.d.) A Thousand Worlds and This, http://tif.ssrc.org/2017/10/18/a-thousand-worldsand-this/. Bracken, C. (1997) The Potlatch Papers: A Colonial Case History, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bridle, J. (2018) New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future, London: Verso. Carter, J. K. (2008) Race: A Theological Account, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chamayou, G. (2015) A Theory of the Drone, (trans.) J. Lloyd, New York: The New Press. Chandler, N. D. (2014) X—The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Thought, New York: Fordham University Press. Chittick, W. C. (1989) The Sufi Path of Knowledge: Ibn al-‘Arabi’s Metaphysics of Imagination, Albany: State University of New York Press. Costa, M. T. (2008) Il carattere distrutivo: Walter Benjamin e il pensiero della soglia, Macerata: Quodlibet. Costa, M. T. (2011) Walter Benjamin: A New Positive Concept of Destruction, Philosophy Study 1.2: 150–158. Cox, B. and A. Cohen (2011) Wonders of the Universe, London: HarperCollins. Crowe, B. D. (2006) Heidegger’s Religious Origins: Destruction and Authenticity, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. De Beauvoir, S. (1953) The Second Sex, (trans.) H. M. Parshley, London: Jonathan Cape. Derrida, J. (1996) Archive Fever, (trans.) E. Prenowitz, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. D’Hondt, J. (1982) Le moment de la destruction dans la dialectique historique de Hegel, Revue Internationale de Philosophie 36.1/2: 125–137. Dold, P. (2003) Kālī the Terrific and Her Tests: The Sākta Devotionalism of the Mahābhāgavata Purāṇa, in R. F. McDermott and J. J. Kripal (eds.), Encountering Kālī: In the Margins, at the Center, in the West, Berkeley: University of California Press. Dorlin, E. (2017) Se défendre: Une philosophie de la violence, Paris: La Découverte. Duhem, L. (2013) Engins de mort: Individuation, technique, thanatologie, in B. Dillet and A. Jugnon (eds.), Technologiques: La pharmacy de Bernard Stiegler, Nantes: Editions Nouvelles Cécile Defaut, 127–165. Friedan, B. (1974) The Feminine Mystique, New York: Dell. Harries, M. (2007) Forgetting Lot’s Wife: On Destructive Spectatorship, New York: Fordham University Press. Heidegger, M. (1954) Was heißt Denken, Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag. Heidegger, M. (1976) What is Called Thinking, (trans.) J. G. Gray, New York: Harper Collins. Husserl, E. (1983) Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, (trans.) F. Kersten, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.

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The destruction of thought Kant, I. (1996) Religion and Rational Theology, (ed. and trans.) A. W. Wood and G. Di Giovanni, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Keller, C. (2005) Apocalypse Now and Then: A Feminist Guide to the End of the World, Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Kolasi, E. (2019) Energy, Economic Growth, and Ecological Crisis, Monthly Review 71.2: 29–46. Land, N. (1992) The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism (An Essay in Atheistic Religion), London: Routledge. Lewis, M. (2017) On Thinking at the End of the World: Derrida, Lyotard, Bataille, in W. Stronge (ed.), Georges Bataille and Contemporary Thought, London: Bloomsbury. Li, D. (2020) The Universal Enemy: Jihad, Empire, and the Challenge of Solidarity, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Liu, A. (2015) Thinking Destruction: Creativity, Rational Choice, Emergence, and Destruction Theory, Occasion: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities 1.1: http://occasion.stanford.edu/node/24 (last accessed 18 November 2019). Livingston, J. (2019) Self-Devouring Growth: A Planetary Parable as Told from Southern Africa, Durham: Duke University Press. Lukács, G. (1981) The Destruction of Reason, (trans.) P. Palmer, Atlantic Highland, NJ: Humanities Press. MacKendrick, K. (2001) Immemorial Silence, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Marder, M. (2017) Energy Dreams: On Actuality, New York: Columbia University Press. Masco, J. (2013) Side Effect, Somatosphere, somatosphere.net/2013/12/side-effect.html (last accessed 16 December 2019). Mirowski, P. (1989) More Heat than Light: Economics as Social Physics: Physics as Nature’s Economics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nichanian, M. (2016) Georges Bataille: The Inhuman Experience, in Makukachu, Anthology of Contemporary Armenian Literature, Yerevan: Inknagir Literary Club, 245–274. Rabinovich, S. (2013) La Biblia y el Drone: Sobre Usos y Abusos de Figuras Bíblicas, Madrid: Iepala Editorial. Rotman, B. (1987) Signifying Nothing: The Semiotics of Zero, London: MacMillan. Rubenstein, M.-J. (2014) Worlds Without End: The Many Lives of the Multiverse, New York: Columbia University Press. Sartre, J.-P. (1956) Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, (trans.) H. E. Barnes, New York: Philosophical Library. Schaffer, S. (2000) Death by Heat, London Review of Books 22.8: 31–36. Schopenhauer, A. (2010) The World as Will and Representation, Vol. 1, (trans.) J. Norman et al., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Seminario di studi benjaminiani (2010) Le vie della distruzione: A partite da Il carattere distruttivo di Walter Benjamin, Macerata: Quodlibet. Silva, D. F. (2007) Toward a Global Idea of Race, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Sorabji, R. (1983) Time, Creation and the Continuum: Theories in Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, London: Duckworth. Spielrein, S. (1994) Destruction as the Cause of Coming Into Being, Journal of Analytical Psychology 39: 155–186. Stern, P. D. (1991) The Biblical Ḥ EREM: A Window on Israel’s Religious Experience, Atlanta: Scholars Press. Stoekl, A. (2007) Bataille’s Peak: Energy, Religion, and Postsustainability, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Vahabi, M. (2004) The Political Economy of Destructive Power, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Walden, J. (2013) Editor’s Introduction, in J. Walden (ed.), Art and Destruction, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Warren, C. L. (2018) Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation, Durham: Duke University Press. Weizman, E. (2011) The Least of All Possible Evils: Humanitarian Violence from Arendt to Gaza, London: Verso. Wittgenstein, L. (2014) Lecture on Ethics, (ed. and trans.) E. Zamuner et al., Oxford: Wiley Blackwell. Yusoff, K. (2018) A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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INDEX

abolitionism 281 absolute thought 63, 76, 95 abstract materialism 194 abstraction 82, 173, 298–99 Academics 257–58 Accursed Share, The 313 Achilles 9–10, 13, 16–8 active life 131 adaptability 156–58 Adler, H.G. 163, 175 Adorno, Theodore 162 afterlife 144 Against the Logicians 257 Against the Physicists 263 Agamemnon 9–10, 16–8 agnosticism 52 Alexander of Hales 206, 208–9, 211 allegory 73 altered states of consciousness 163, 166 Althusser, Louis 266–78 ambivalence 314 amnesia 136–41, 143 An Essay Concerning Human Understanding 230 anachronicity 277 Anglo-African Magazine, The 280 animal(s): Aristotle's beliefs 164; intelligence 50; reasoning by 36–7; reflective sensation 54; syllogistic reasoning by 54 annihilation of thought 310 Anscombe, G. E. M 15 anthropogenesis 168 Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View 221, 226 anti-foundationalism 60

Antikythera Mechanism 401 anti-psychologism 55 Antisthenes 117 Apollo 191 Apologia of a Madman 295 Apology 13 appearances 257–59 apperception 93 apprehension 255 Aquinas, Thomas 58, 206 Aquine, W.V.O. 49 Araujo, Marcelo de 143 Arcesilaus 253 Arendt, Hannah 58, 60–1 Aristotelianism 208 Aristotle 9, 12, 14, 18, 37–8, 41, 56, 82, 87, 164, 190, 204–5, 207–8, 211, 309 art/artist 1, 31, 53, 60–1, 67, 121, 131–32, 246, 289 “as if” mentality 28 Athenaeum 68, 72 Augustine 54, 57–8, 208, 212–13 Aunt Chloe poems 283–85 authentic meaning 93 Avicenna 207–8, 211–16 Badiou, Alain 274 Bakunin, Mikhail 293, 296–300 Balibar, Etienne 266–67 Bataille, Georges 308, 310–11, 313–14 beauty 42, 64–5, 73, 121, 132, 244, 296 Being: chain of 154–56; intelligibility of 81–2; as oscillation 70; prereflective state of 66; unconditioned and undivided nature of 63

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Index Benjamin, Walter 60, 91–9, 162, 175, 308, 311 Bentham, Jeremy 282 Bentinck, William 149 Bergson, Henri 50, 56, 58 bias, discriminative 30–1 Bichat, Xavier 50, 53–4 Bieniak, Magdalena 212 Biran, Maine de 50, 53, 57 Blanchot, Maurice 308 Blumenbach, J.F. 157 bodies 4, 41, 52–3, 58, 164, 166–67, 170–71, 174, 180–82, 184–88, 194, 196–97, 203, 213, 237, 239, 241, 244–47 body 24, 42, 51, 53, 55, 58, 139, 142, 144–45, 148, 151, 163–64, 173–74, 179, 182, 185, 187, 192–97, 199–200, 202–3, 212–13, 220, 226, 237, 241, 244–47, 271, 286, 295 Boethius 210 Bonnet, Charles 149–51, 154–56, 158 Brague, Rémi 56 Brentano, Franz 164–65 Butler, Judith 140 cannibalism 297–99 Capital 200, 269–72 Carnap 103–4, 106, 108–9, 112 Carneades 257–60 Carruthers, Mary 209 Carson, Anne 247 Castro, Eduardo Viveiros de 170 categorical judgments 80 Cavarero, Adriana 236, 245–46 Césaire, Suzanne 243 Chaadaev, Pyotr 293–96, 304 Chalmers, David 110–12 Chan Buddhism 23, 31 Child, Lydia Maria 285 Chrysippus 49 Cicero 258 Clarke, Samuel 49 Clitomachus 257, 260 cogito 97, 138–39 collective egoism 297 colonialism 236, 304, 308 Commentary on John 58 concept(s) 2, 41, 56, 62, 64, 66–7, 69–70, 72–3, 75–85, 87–9, 93–4, 96, 98, 104, 111, 151, 155, 165–66, 172, 211, 226, 231, 242, 244, 246, 267–69, 271, 273, 275–76, 280, 282, 308, 311–12 conceptual realism 81 Confucius 21–4, 33 conscientia 53 consciousness: altered states of 163, 166; division in 65; dynamic nature of 71; empirical 124; Freud’s studies of 164; intentional object of 165, 169;

inward transformability and 174; Meinong’s beliefs about 165; as mode of thinking 81; modern 303; naturalism of 56; objects and 164; phenomenology and 166; psychophysics and 166; reflective 61–2, 67; representations and 61; self-consciousness 61–5; “so-being” and 165; states of 174; sub-threshold 164, 166, 169; unity of 62 Constant, Benjamin 49 contemplation: consequence of 121; creation and 119, 121–23; by Intellect 127; making and 122; object of 121–22; as vision 124 contemplative life 118, 131 Cosmism 300 creation, contemplation and 119, 121–23 critical idealism 62–3, 65, 69 Critique of Pure Reason 224–26, 231 Damascus 215 Das Lebendige und das Göttliche 163, 166, 168 Das psychophysiologische Problem und sein Arbeitsgebiet: ein methodologische Einleitung 163 David-Ménard, Monique 224–26 De Anima 54 De anima et spiritu 210 De ecclesiastics dogmatibus 212 De Genesi ad litteram 214 De Libero Arbitrio 54 De Rerum Natura 191, 199 De spiritu et anima 212, 214 death 301, 303 dehumanisation 282 deliberation: in Homeric writings 9, 11–2; nontechnical 15; philosophical models of 12–5; practical 9, 11; technical 15 Delphi 191–92 dementia 222 demiurge 180, 183, 187 Der Begriff der Kunstkritik in der deutschen Romantik 98 derangement 223–24 Descartes, René 49, 61, 135–46, 200 Destruction of Reason 162 dialectic/dialectical 73, 93, 118, 123–24, 127, 162, 200, 219, 226, 236, 242–44, 260, 269, 276–77, 309–10 Diderot, Denis 149, 152–54, 158 Die Wirklichkeit der Hebräer 167 Dilthey, Wilhem 63 Diomedes 17 Dionysius 191–92, 210 divine Craftsman 120, 122 dogmatism 69, 255–56, 261 Dolar, Mladen 276 Dominicans 206 dreaming 173–74

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Index Dreams of a Spirit-Seer 223–25 Dreyfus, Hubert 49–53, 55 dualism: form-content 78; of mind and matter 52; of object and subject 60, 62; transcendental 53 Eddington, Arthur 52 egoism 297 Elements of Psychophysics 164 Elements of Theology 207 Empiricus, Sextus 253–57 Encyclopedia: introduction to 76–9; overview of 75–6; subjective thought 79–85; syllogisms of philosophy 85–7 Engels, Friedrich 266, 275, 308 Epicurus 190, 192 ethical knowledge 18 ethical outlook: active processes in 31; alternative mode of 23–6, 32–3; definition of 30; development of 30–2; passive processes in 31; practice model of 32 ethnography 167, 173 eudaimonia 38 Euripides 191 Euthyphro 13 exception, state of 295 experimental philosophy 173–75 experimental theology 175 “fact of consciousness” 60 fallibility 38 Fanon, Frantz 236 faulty reasoning 227–33 Fechner, Gustav 164–65 Federalism, Socialism, and Antitheologism 298–99 Fedorov, Nikolai 293, 300–5 Ferraris, Maurizio 167 Feurbach, Ludwig 268 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 60–2, 65–6, 68–9, 71, 93, 99 fictional objects 175 focus imaginarius 224–25 Forest Leaves 280 formalist program 103, 105 Francis of Assisi 206 Franciscans: history of 206; psychology of 211–16 Frank, Manfred 60 freedom 66, 71, 85, 103, 141, 158, 219, 243–44, 285, 287, 289, 298–99 Frege, Gottlob 54, 81, 83 French Revolution 68 Freud, Sigmund 164, 227–33, 239, 273 Garcia, Tristan 167 Gegen die Dichtung 163, 168 German Ideology, The 266, 268, 270, 274–76 Gewalt 311–12

Glissant, Édouard 242 Gödel, K. 101–2, 105–7, 109–10, 112–13 Goethe, J. W. 57, 68 Goeze, Johann A.E. 156 Golberg, Oskar 166–67 Grant, Iain Hamilton 158 Grimm, Jacob 221 Grimm, Wilhelm 221 habits 204 Halensian Summists 212 Haller, Albrecht 157 Harman, Graham 167 Harper, Francis Ellen Watkins 279–90 heart, mind and 27, 29 Hector 13, 15–7 Hegel, G. W. F. 62, 152, 200, 260, 268, 272, 275–77, 294 Heidegger, Martin 2, 52, 98, 308, 311–12, 315 Heisenberg, Werner 198 Heller-Roazen, Daniel 53 Henrich, Dieter 64 Hepworth, Barbara 56 Herder, J.G. 71, 157 hero, in Homeric writings 9, 15–8 heroism 15–6, 242 Hesiod 183 Hesse, Herman 31 Hilbert, David 103, 105 historical materialism 270, 276 historicism 71 Hobbes, Thomas 229–30, 232 Hölderin, Friedrich 60–5, 73, 99 Holzwege 98 Homer/Homeric writings 190; characters in 9–11, 13; deliberation in 9, 11–3; ethical code in 15; ethical failure in 17; ethical success in 17; hero in 9, 15–8; heroic code in 15–6; practical thinking in 15, 19 Hugh of St Cher 212 Hugo, Victor 152 human beings: companionship by 38; construction-cause of 169; how best to live 37; intelligence of 50; intimate friendship by 38; language of 168–69; practical thinking by 36; rational thinking by 39; realism of 40; reason 54; reasoning abilities of 40; senses of 39–40; thinking by 82–3 Hume, David 40 Husserl, Edmund 54, 163–64 Hyperion 64–6 hypnosis 163 iconism 171 idealism 125, 196; absolute 87; critical 62–3, 65,

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Index 69; philosophical 267; poetry as 68; scepticism and 200–2; twisted reasoning of 200 identity: Benjamin’s view of 93; of object 62–3, 96; objective 94; of subject 62–3, 96; of thought 96 ideology 267, 272, 275 Iliad 9, 15 illusion: perceptual 199; self-consciousness and 67; thinking as 67, 95; truth and 67 Ilyich, Ivan 31 imagination: description of 146, 214; ecokinetic 202–4; Lucretius’ view of 203; mythic 162–75 imbecility 221 impredicative 93 inauthentic meaning 93 inchoate Intellect 128 incompleteness theorems 102, 104–5, 107 indeterminancy 198, 248 Intellect: contemplative activity of 126–27, 130, 132; creative power of 129; description of 124–26; genesis of 128, 130; internal activity of 128; self-constitution of 129; self-sufficiency of 127–29 intellectual intuition 63–4, 66–7, 69 intellectual memory 136–38, 141–46 intellectual virtue 43–4 intellectus adeptus 214–15 intellectus in habitu 214 Interpretation of Dreams, The 229, 231 Iola Leroy 280–83, 285–89 Irigaray, Luce 236–48 irony 72–3 Ishii, Miho 167, 174 Jacobi, F.H. 63, 70 John of Damascus 213 John of La Rochelle 208, 212–13, 215 jokes 228 judgment 63; categorical 80, 83; etymology of 81; Hegel’s view of 83; as level of thought 80; Locke’s discussions on 230; suspension of 254; thinking and 83–4 justice 54, 121, 128, 174, 280, 284–85, 287–90, 298, 300, 305 Kant, Immanuel 51, 274; description of 50–1, 57, 60, 70, 96, 219–20; “Essay on the Maladies of the Head” 220–24; psychopathology of 220–24; reason and 219 khôra 179–89 Kielmeyer, C.F. 149, 156–58 knowledge 4, 13, 18, 40–4, 53, 57, 60–2, 64, 67, 69–72, 81–7, 91, 93, 96, 103, 107, 109–12, 118, 120, 126, 128, 131–32, 154–55, 179, 190–91, 193–95, 197–201, 205, 210, 214, 216, 219, 221,

224, 257, 266–67, 271, 274–77, 285–86, 308, 314 Kohn, Eduardo 167, 170, 173–75 La palingénésie philosophique 156 Lacan, Jacques 273 language: as calculus 101; cosmopoetic 172; syntax of 107; Unger’s beliefs about 168–69; ur-function of 172 Lash, Nicholas 50 Lectures on Anthropology 221 Les Miserables 31, 152 Lessing, G.E. 63 Letters on Patriotism 298–300 Letters to The Comrades of the International Workingmen’s Association of Locle and Chaux-deFonds 296 Leviathan 229 Levinas, Emmanuel 315 Lewis, Michael 313 Liber de causis 207–8 Lichtenberg, G. C. 97 L’Isolé Soleil 242 literary history 136–41 Locke, John 163, 230 L’Oeil et l’Esprit 55 Logical Structure of the World, The 103 logical syntax 102–3, 106, 108, 110–11 Logical Syntax of Language, The 103 Lombard, Peter 210 Lonergan, Bernard 50 love: description of 58, 191–92, 244, 246, 261, 281, 283, 297, 300; immortal 43–5 Lucretius 190–204 Lugones, Maria 241 Lukács, Georg 162 Luther, Martin 312 Lyceum 72 MacKendrick, Karmen 307 Mackinnon, Donald 50 madness 224–27, 232 making: as consequence of contemplation 122; purpose of 121–22; thinking and 118–23 Marx, Karl 266–78 Marxism 266 Massiliensis, Gennadius 212 material intellect 214–15 materialism 155, 192; abstract 194; defining trait of 277; dialectical philosophy as 277; epistemology 191; Hegel’s writings on 276–77; historical 270, 276; method 268; philosophical 194; thinking and 190; transcendental 192 mathematics 43; as logical syntax 103; logicalsyntactical conception of 108; realism about 106

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Index matricide 237 Mauss, Marcel 312 Maximin, Daniel 236–37, 242–44 McDowell, John 49–51, 53 Meillassoux, Quentin 52 Meinong, Alexius 163, 165, 167, 169, 175 memory: Descartes and 136–37; failure of 138; intellectual 136–38, 141–46 Mencius 23 Menelaus 13, 16–7 mental faculties 82–3, 85, 213–14, 219–23, 226–28, 232 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 50, 55–8, 197 metaphysics: Christian 275; inquiry based on 111; madness and 224–27; negative aspects of 225; Neoplatonic 268; occultism and 224; Plotinus’ 120; politics 175; of science 79, 87; semantics based on 111–12 Mêtis 244–48 métissages 236–37, 242–48 Mill, J.S. 49, 54 mind: body and 195; disturbances of 226; fault of 198–200; formative power of 68; heart and 27, 29; Lucretius’ view of 198–200, 203; movements of 198; presentation of 68; as sense organ 202; simulacra effects on 202–3; vast 68 Minnie’s Sacrifice 289 Molina, Alonso de 91 More, Henry 56 Muses 192–93, 195, 203 mysticism 69 myth 162; imagination 162–75; mythological meaning 195 Mythos Erkenntnis Wirklichkeit 163, 167, 174

thoughtful examination of 75–6; unitary selfsameness in 172 Observations of the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime 221 occultism 224 Odysseus 10, 12, 16, 245 Odyssey 9–10 omega-rule 109 onomatopoetic thinking 171–72 ontogeny 168–69, 172 ontological turn 167 organism: consciousness of 166; construction-cause of 166, 168–69; self-creating activity of 166 Outlines of Pyrrhonism 253, 256, 260, 262 Ovid 150

Nagel, Thomas 52–4 naturalism: Bakunin’s 297–98; medieval 56–7; of the ancients 49, 53 Nausica 10 Negative Dialectics 162 Newman, John Henry 33 Nicholas I 294 Nicomachean Ethics 37–8, 42 Niethammer, Friedrich 63–4, 69 Nietzsche, Friedrich 97 nihilism 307 non-naturalism 49–50 “non-thoughts” 76 nothingness 294–96, 304 Novalis 65–9, 73 object(s): concepts and 81; consciousness and 164; fictional 175; identity of 62, 96; of knowledge 275; metaphysical identity of 94; subject and 60, 62–3, 80, 127; of thinking 138; of thought 127;

palingenesis 155 panpsychism 52 parapraxis 227 Paris 17 Parmenides 163, 167 parthogenesis 153–54 patriotism 297–98 Peano Arithmetic 106 Peirce, Charles Sanders 170 Peleus 16 perception 29–30, 32, 56, 83, 128, 164, 166, 171, 179, 181–82, 196, 198–99, 204, 222, 229 phantasms 203 phantoms 270 Phemius 10 Phenomenology of Spirit 275–76 Philo of Alexandria 40 Philosphiches Journal 71 phylogeny 167–68 physicalism 103 piety 13 Pinkard, Terry 63 Pippin, Robert 75, 78, 82, 84 plagiarism 21–2 Plato 9, 12–3, 18, 56, 58, 82, 119, 172, 179, 181, 239 Plotinus 39, 42, 44, 117–34, 207, 268 poetry: Descartes’ 138; Harper’s 283–85; as idealism 68; philosophy and 72–3; romantic 72; self-reflexiveness in 72; sound/action patterns 196; transcendental 72 Political Theology 296 Politik und Metaphysik 162–63, 175 polyps 148–59 Poseidon 10 practical deliberation: Aristotelian model of 13–5; decisions from 14; end and 14–5; features of 12; goals and 13; by Homeric characters 9, 11–2; non-technical 15; piety in

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Index 13; skill in 12; Socrates’ view on 12; technical 15 practical reasoning 41–2 prayer 58 pre-animism 91 Pre-Intellect 128, 130 Preston, John 49–50 primacy of practice 21–3, 120 Principle of Tolerance 103, 110 Proclus 207 Project for a Scientific Psychology 164 Protagoras 12, 18 psychologism 54, 81 psychology: of Franciscans 211–16; phenomenological 164, 166 psychopathology 222–24 Psychopathology of Everyday Life, The 227–28 Pyrrho of Elis 253 Pyrrhonist scepticism 256 Pythagoreans 172 Question of Fraternity, The 301 quiddity 56 racialisation 244 Rahner, Karl 50 Ravaisson, Félix 50, 56 Reading Capital 272–73 realism 40; about mathematics 106; conceptual 81 reason: animal sensation and 54; critical 228–29; higher kind of life 54; intellect versus 60; Kant’s view on 219; as level of thought 80; naturalism of 56; perverted 223, 226; self-knowing 86; understanding versus 60 Reaumur, R.A.F. 150 reductionism 52 reductive naturalism 53 reflection: infinitude of 99; potentialized 69; thinking as 61, 69 Reinhold, Karl Leonhard 60–1 Retractationes 208 Richard of Saint Victor 210 Rorty, Amélie 1–2 Runa tribe 170 Sartre, Jean-Paul 310 scepticism 200–2, 253–54, 260–61 sceptics 256 Schelling, F.W.J. 60–1, 73, 86, 152, 158 Schiller, Friedrich 63 Schlegel, Friedrich 60–1, 66, 68–73, 159 Schlutz, Alexander 67 Schmitt, Carl 296–98, 300 scholasticism 207, 209–11 Scholem, Gershom 91–2, 94, 96–7, 162 Science of Logic 82 Scotus, John Duns 206

scrutability thesis 111 secondary qualities 163–64 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 248 self-blame 28 self-cognition 126 self-consciousness 61–5, 67, 70, 77; transcendental 93 self-constitution 243 self-creation 117–34 self-deception 196 self-discovery 298 self-feeling 70 self-knowing reason 86 self-knowledge 132 self-making: conditions of 127–30; thinking as 123–27 self-positing subject 60, 62–3, 66, 69 self-sufficiency 119–20, 127–29 self-thinking 85, 127 Sellars, Wilfrid 50 senses 39–40, 201–2 sensitive soul 213–14 Sider, Theodore 110–11 simulacra 200, 202 Sketches of Southern Life 283 slavery 38, 244–45, 286 “so-being” 165 Socrates 12, 42, 82; practical deliberation by 12–3; practical knowledge as salvation 18 soul 42–3, 57, 70, 120–21, 124, 131, 137, 151, 155, 164, 179, 184, 187, 192, 212–13, 222, 224, 245, 290 speculative thinking 41–3 Speculum de l’autre femme 237 Spinoza, Baruch 62–3, 139–41, 144–45, 270, 274 Stoics 37, 54, 255, 258 Strawson, Galen 52 subject: identity of 62–3; object and 60, 62–3, 80, 127; self-consciousness of 62; self-positing 60, 62–3, 66, 69; of thought 127 substance 62, 121–22 sub-threshold consciousness 164, 166, 169 Summa de anima 212–13, 215 Summa Halensis 208–10, 213–14 suspension of judgment 254 Swedenborg, Emanuel 225 symptomatic reading 271–75 synasethesia 53–4 syntax: arithmetization of 104; of language 107; logical 102–3, 106, 108, 110–11; rules of 104 System des transcendentalen Idealismus 61 Tarski, Alfred 104 Taylor, Charles 55 Telemachus 10 teleology 53 Thales 190 Theaetetus 42

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Index Themistius 117 Theogony 183 Theology of Aristotle 208 This Sex Which Is Not One 238 Timaeus: description of 119–20, 126, 131; khôra in 179–89 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 93, 102 Traité d’insectologie 155 tranquility 254 transcendence 299 transcendental: description of 69, 97; Dialectic 219; dualism 53; poetry 72; self-consciousness 93 Trembley, Abraham 148–50, 155, 157–58 truth: contemplation of 58; correctness and 96; illusion and 67; as infinite interconnecting 99; relational 71; self-authenticating nature of 58; sensation and 192; sensory experience of 58; Tarski’s definition of 104; as thinkicket-like 92 Turing machines 106, 108 twisted reasoning 195–96, 200–1, 204 twoness 172 Über die äesthetische Erziehung des Menschen 63 Über die Lehre des Spinoza 63 Über die Verhältnisse der organischen Kräfte unter eindander in der Reihe der verschiedenen Organisationen 157 unconscious 51, 64–5, 67, 139, 173, 227–28, 239, 273–74, 304 Unger, Erich 162–75 Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels 91, 98

Utilitarianism 282, 288 value 56–7 Virgil 143 virtue 38, 42; intellectual 43–4; practical 42 vision 197–98; contemplation as 124 vitalism 57 Voculario en Lengua Castellana y Mexicana 91 Volland, Sophie 153 Vorschule für eine Experimentaltheologie 163 Walcott, Derek 242 Wang Yangming 23, 26, 33 Weber, Samuel 91 Weed, Elizabeth 238–39 Wilhelm Mesiers Lehrjahre 68 William of Auxerre 209 William of Ockham 206 Williams, Rowan 56 Williams Bernard 9 Wirklichkeit Mythos Erkenntnis 163, 167, 174 wit 229–30 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 52, 93, 101 Woldemar 70 Writing the Book of the World 110 Zeus 10, 121, 132 Zhu Xi 23, 31, 33 Žižek, Slavoj 266

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