Science and Philosophy: A Global Re-Evaluation
François Laruelle
In En tant qu’un: la «non-philosophie» expliquée aux philosophes (Paris: Aubier, 1991), 79-115.
Translated by Jeremy R. Smith [All errors and footnotes my own – TN]
What can philosophy do? On philosophy as the capital-form of thought
It is not sufficient to think that after the deconstructions, which have brought philosophical autocritique to its extreme point without destroying the oldest prejudices of philosophy, the only solution would be the measure philosophy by science and finally tackle the old problem “head-on” – which will have irritated the philosophers so much so that they would have thoroughly repressed it: the real relations of science and philosophy. This is not a sufficient reason. It is a simple indication, an impulse which perhaps only has an authentic scientific meaning and can only arrive from the shore [bord] opposite philosophy. Here, we are careful not to return to the old thematic worn out by so many failures: philosophy as science (rigorous or not) and one will recognize that the only driving, if not rectifying instances of thought are the sciences, the sciences themselves rather than Being itself…This specification must break the confusion – the amphibology – which touches on all of the concepts of philosophy, in particular its concept “science.” To part from philosophy-as-science to science-of-philosophy, from the “science of Being” to the “sciences themselves,” the meaning of this word, science, perhaps dramatically changes.
A thought does not explain itself through its apparent finalities which it discovers afterwards by exceeding them, and yet, such finalities were from the beginning active [agissantes] and necessary but as a material, as the object of an experimentation through which a thought-one [pensée-une] emerged so as to never be reduced to their sum. Under this reserve, the principal object that this thought and research programme pursues, a programme that is sometimes called “first science,” sometimes “non-philosophy,” can be formulated thus:
1) The point – obviously – is to be able to think the computer, the new sciences, human rights, racism, etc. – all of the objects of these times;
2) But without making a “philosophy for our epoch” or “for our times,” or a philosophy that is “resolutely modern”;
3) For philosophy has not thought about the objects of ancient times (when it was neither modern nor contemporary) any more than the objects of these times;
4) Since philosophy is either ancient or modern, it prevents us from adequately thinking the real; between the real and us, philosophy has woven the veil of all illusions – Being; for the reality of objects, for the identity of thought, philosophy substitutes the reflective mirror, the specular screen of ontology.
If there was an affect in which the vision-in-One has drawn its energy without being exhausted in it, it is very well that of the inhibition of thought that produces its false opening of the philosophical type. Philosophy is this gesture that only allows us to think in preventing us from radically and adequately thinking, deriving to its benefit what we call the power (of) thought [force (de) pensée], the cause of the most adequate thought of the real. The power (of) thought authorizes thought: it prescribes and limits thought. Whence do philosophers know that it’s just that, “thinking”? Thought has no need to be “opened” – or opened/closed.
As to its access to the real, philosophy is an illusion from side to side: it believes to be able to know an object = X. Philosophy poses the equation knowing = knowing an object, while knowledge – the only one which verifies itself – is a “causal” process [processus «à cause»] or an object process [processus à objets]. Yet no longer, and not more than, by definition, we never know an object, but we know the real – its cause – which is not objective, through the means of “objects.” To think new technologies, racism, democracy, photography, etc., is never to aim at them directly, to consider them as dependent parts of thought and the real, as objects objectivated by them and constitutive by their being in return. Rather, it is to include them, as an index, support and material, but never as “objects” in the philosophical sense of the word; to include them within a process of production of universal representations which are without common measure, without a “common form” among them. This is what science-of means…To know a phenomenon is not to know an object, to objectivate it through a category or to ecstatically identify with it. To know is to require the phenomenon under the triple function of material, index, and support of representations which exceed them through their universality and which, as they are [en tant que telles], manifest the unobjective real through their very existence where they are the knowledge. This, at least, is what science understands of itself when it no longer thinks through philosophical delegation.
The contrary belief is philosophy and what philosophy does: instead of allowing us to think and know things – like the simple means of knowledge – philosophy blinds us and leads us astray in so-called “objects.” Philosophy auto-inhibits itself, paralyses itself in this image of the real that is not the adequate thought of the real. For science, thought must be adequate: not to an object, but to the un-objective real that we do not yet know how to represent it if it is not this old term “the One” or “Identity” that is more the indication of a problem than a solution. Thus, it is not reason which is the enemy of thought, but philosophical “thought” which is the enemy of scientific thought.
Let us take the following axioms which guide us in the description of non-philosophy:
1) Philosophy is the capital within thought, the capital-form of our general relations to the World; it is an autonomous generalized form of socio-economic capital.
2) It is impossible to struggle against this capital in general, in the restricted or broad sense, by means drawn from it (philosophical means or neighboring means to the philosophical: politics, ethics, etc.); it is impossible, in general, to struggle against this capital which is the whole of possible struggle. It is impossible to struggle against philosophy, philosophy being the whole of possible mastery, the Universal Master.
3) However, a science of capital – of philosophy, universal mastery – is possible and this science contains a suspension or a reduction of philosophical mastery, but in no way a mastery of mastery. There is a “politics” – a democracy – immanent to science, the only one which, without entering into struggle with philosophical capital, can suspend and limit the universality of its order.
4) The science of philosophy – of capital within thought – does not treat philosophy like an object, thus again on the philosophical mode (following from what has been said) – but treats it, under the condition of this suspension, like a material, an index and a support for a process of knowledge more universal and more adequate to this a-philosophical or un-objective real that we call the One.
Philosophy is congenitally foreign to science and utterly to all of experience. Philosophy has the imperious need for this experience – to identify experience with philosophy – precisely because philosophy is far from its origins and finalities and that it relates itself to experience – art, science, law, ethics, etc. – not at all to think this experience but to use it for its own benefit. How can one believe that a thought as limited by its origins and its prejudices, also in-sufficient, concerning the real which compensates this deficiency in the real through a prodigious pretension and through the culture of its past and its texts, how can one believe in this thought without looking to otherwise practice theoretical espionage and insider trading, that one such thought would be sufficient to approach a reality which has always played outside of the old ontological closure? How can one believe in this thought which would be sufficient to approach phenomena that never happened in the “World” or in “Being,” but rather elsewhere, in this no philosophy land[1] which deploys itself from the One to Being [Etant]? How can one believe in this thought which would be sufficient to approach from the One-real, which is not of a phantasmatic nature like Being [Etre], to Being [Etant] as to the effectivity finally liberated from Being [Etre] as well and accessing a “full employment” that science alone can procure it, a “full employment” used for the knowledge of the real, not for the finalities of philosophy?
What one must avoid above all – for reasons of rigor and dignity in thought – is therefore in doing like the philosophers: they deduct from a determined science a local sequence of knowledge, a completed theory (Galileo, Newton, Einstein, Cantor, etc.), and abstract it from the immanence of the scientific process to submit it to a new legality, a foreign but alienating and capitalizing legality: philosophy, which would make these local sequences into effects of meaning, truth, and value of which it has need and that it attributes itself as if philosophy had produced them. The most profound, the most extensive of the triangulations is that of scientific knowledge by philosophy. It exceeds in power and in ruse the oedipalization of the unconscious. The procedure is always the same: isolate a knowledge, abstract a theory, break it from what it can be in it – from the power (of) thought – and make it pass by constraint under the law of the philosophical decision. Thus, it is this grafting onto new but local knowledges a Platonic gesture, a Kantian gesture, a Cartesian gesture, etc., which is never a simple ornamentation, but which penetrates, consumes and destroys scientific knowledge.
How does philosophy work more precisely? It isolates the theoretical not only from another theoretical sequence an object of knowledge of another object (why arbitrarily choose this theory rather than another?), but from the immanent process which gives to knowledge its absolutely inescapable identity and – it’s the same thing – its chaotic nature, its nature as multiplicity, its more-than-atomic nature of knowledges (the atom is a model of transcendent identity, not yet a model of immanence). But philosophy does not isolate it to let it float in exteriority; philosophy must assure this immanent process and assure itself with a reality, to form the real with it. Philosophy folds it therefore back onto itself, it uses it to pose it, therefore to pose it a second time or to autopose it, thus giving a real-empirical content to its gesture, producing through this procedure, it believes, the real as desired. Philosophy is this procedure of autoposition of knowledge or the theoretical and the autoposition is par excellence the philosophical gesture, but a gesture which has need of a foreign material of knowledge to abstract it, to suppose it completed and completes it a second time through its autoposition. Thus, we recognize a philosopher – this is a sure criterion – when he seizes upon a knowledge produced outside of the conditions of philosophy, that he captures it, diverts it from its element of production and critique, and submits this knowledge to the constraints of a transcendent decision in view of making it produce another thing than knowledge: this miraculously philosophical surplus-value of meaning, truth and value.
What does “changing the base” in the relations of science and philosophy mean?
Each generation that will discover as having given rise to a thought or an epoch must first cross a necessary obstacle. Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, Marx and others, stood in front of an infinite wall, an unlimited one in all directions: a philosophy – Plato, Aristotle, Leibniz, Hegel, etc. This obstacle only has an uncrossable existence and nevertheless is crossed by a hero-philosopher: how does one think after the exhaustion of thought? How does one break with…how does one begin again beyond…how does one break through this infinite wall…? There is no philosophy without this leap or this twist which is worth breaking. It is a plastic thought which is bent and unbent, a leap or a dance, continuously torn apart, living from its death. Nevertheless, nothing works: this agitation, this transcendental oscillation of the Soul has never allowed philosophy to exceed its internal limits, rather it reinforces them, extricating [dégageant] them as invariants impossible to force. Philosophy is a wall which one can only go along without hoping to break through it. It is the very wall of the old Cosmos become Capital. Philosophy is this thought traced from the finite order of the World, it was and is always a cosmpolitics or a being-in-the-World, an onto-cosmo-logy; a being-in-Capital. But, if it is impossible to break through it, it is not impossible to think it within a science. Our task is worse as much as it is lighter, for it is no longer that of a resolute decision: we do not have to invent a new philosophy to better approach the real, but to discover that the most adequate thought of the real already exists outside of every possible philosophy. To still ask according to the usual style, how does one think “after” the deconstructions of metaphysics – “after” Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Derrida – remains once and for all within the symptom of the philosophical enclosure. It can no longer here be than the simple indication of a task which can no longer be formulated in terms of a parallel than neighboring: what is science parallel to philosophy…? Yet, within the domain of thought, a relation of parallelism is either a simple juxtaposition, or a very “unitary” and “authoritarian” unity – in both cases a relation of the philosophical type, the way in which philosophy breaks and renews this rupture with its past. As for science, since it is a matter of elucidating it from its own perspective, thinks itself in a relation of a wholly other type to philosophy. Without tracing in any way any line of demarcation, no delimitation, without borrowing any of the archaic topographic means proper to the Greek grounds of metaphysics – the means of reversal and displacement associated to the line – science immediately raises the universal sufficiency of philosophy and immediately treats it on the mode of a material, index and symbolic support, which are functions internal to science. Science is assumed without decision, in a manner that is rather postural or immanent, in a relation from the outset non-philosophical, but in no way contrary to philosophy. This means that this posture is not conquered through reversal, inversion, displacement, etc.; it is not related to philosophy as to philosophy’s past, by remembering it and limiting its effect. And from this relation, science is content with describing or manifesting it, of giving it a new representation but such that it has always been without having to be produced or reproduced by whatever special operation.
To give a new interpretation of the most general relations of science and philosophy is to first bracket their epistemological interpretation in general, with its positivist, idealist, conventionalist, critical, etc. avatars. Materialism, too: for Marxism has not known to recognize science’s autonomy with regard to philosophy except through an ultimate privilege of the latter, and through an operation of the reversal [or overthrow, renversement] and displacement of Hegel’s absolute idealism, which cannot be the way in which science regards its relation to philosophy. This change of base supposes in recognizing that science is itself endowed with a transcendental power. Identity, as it is, which is its cause, forms [fait] what it maintains with this real, the real itself, the most essential relation, that it is no deduced from the philosophical images that have been given to science from Plato to Heidegger. Science does not dream, it knows-and-thinks the real.
This manifestation of the scientific relation to philosophy or to whatever phenomenon makes it appear, with the “objective” phenomenon or the data which are included in it, on the mode of a particular being-given, the being-given of discovery. With difference to invention which is of a technological spirit and therefore philosophical, which associates or connects in exteriority as much as in interiority the scattered elements to them to make a being emerge which is only partially new and at the limit of the material utilized, discovery is the proper to scientific manifestation or the scientific being-given. It is the manifestation, as absolutely new or emergent through the givens treated as material and support, of a more universal representation which within its very manifestation is revealed as already-there, without nevertheless prolonging the theoretical and experimental data which have served it as material and how we can say that they are along that with which it has been made.
Science resolves this philosophical paradox in which we know how Kant and Husserl made of it an aporia, in which they got tangled up until they had to philosophize interminably to not exit from it. It is the paradox of a production of really new knowledges but in which the novelty does not change anything to the real or is content with revealing it as it is…This paradox is the emergence of the theory or of one theory which is at once:
1) radically Other: not in relation to the givens (for it is rather which makes them appear as simple givens) but the Other itself or the Other as it is;
2) An Other already-there and which does not change its manifestation. Science is an ideal production, not a real production (there is no such thing) or is not an effective production (that is technological production). By not changing the real, science does not change itself either – which philosophy would postulate – but changes its knowledges or its theories. Science also sees “in that which is,” but it is only to change what it sees (of) the real rather than the real itself. It manifests itself as the point-source or the “break” – but on condition of knowing that these phenomena are those of scientific representation, of the being-theoretical of theory and which only have relative autonomy from their cause – the power (of) thought or the Identity which determines them in the last instance. This emergence seems philosophically done within and outside of its history, at the limit of experience, as a decision which exceeds the knowledge of the epoch and prolongs it. In reality, this is a philosophical and aporetic image of science. Science has never been the fruit of a decision older than it.
This is the set of the phenomena which form the rigorous comprehension of the famous slogan: change the base or change terrain. This formula is the index and the material of a more adequate representation of the true relation to philosophy. It loses its spontaneous philosophical meaning when it signifies that science is already this ground or this basis unexchangeable through which we can change relation to philosophy, but which does not change the fact of thinking from it. In all respects, science would rather be a topography rather than a topology where it exacerbates philosophical perversity. But it is furthermore not a topography – which is only a symbolic support. We only “change the base” to manifest or know that the unexchangeable base is already there, unexchangeable also with philosophy and with philosophical exchangeability.
What can science do?
To take up an old question, what is the value of science? It is not a transcription nor even a knowledge of objects or facts. If we pose the transcendental question par excellence, that of its relation to reality and to what reality, and if we strive to globally re-evaluate the science-philosophy relations to the benefit of science in order to change the nature of their business, it itself responds through three theses, which only make up one:
1) What can be thought and written of the real is the fact of science, rather than philosophy.
2) Science is neither reduced to a network or systemic game, a series of effects of the relations of power; nor to a local sequence of knowledge or a particular theory (dynamic, set theory, etc.): there is an essence of science (a theoretically consistent object) that one discovers or that one does not discover, but is susceptible to becoming the object itself of a description and a theory, under the form of a science not of sciences or local knowledges, but of the essence of science. This thesis is, in reality, identical to the first, concluded from it or even explains the first.
3) It is science itself which thinks itself and describes itself in its relation to the real and its essence. Philosophy is useless – as a perspective at least – in speaking about this relation, characterizing and grounding it; it is only useful as the “objective givens” of this science (of the essence of science). This thesis is equally identical to the first two.
That science would not have need of a philosophy to decipher the meanings and measure the truth of this writing, even philosophers who are ready to admit the first thesis certainly do not admit to it, not having perceived the signification of the second thesis. We will respond to them that the former supposes the latter two, that there is no possible half-measure or distribution of tasks. The great philosophical distribution of knowledge and thought is abolished by the identity of science which refuses the law of the unitary justice of philosophy: to science, the knowledges without thought (of the real); to philosophy, the thought without knowledges, that it must take from the sciences. What can be thought and said of the real is housed by science and is never an ontology: science thinks its essence and is not content with producing objects of local knowledges. It is why the equations mathematics = ontology, physics = ontology, biology = ontology, on which philosophies erect themselves, serve it as nothing, rather serving philosophy which reduces science to being (as thought) an ontology, a semi-scientific, semi-philosophical discipline. Science does not recognize this originary continuity of knowledge and thought, this distribution which is the whole philosophical economy of knowledge; science does not recognized them by knowing that philosophy in this affair is judge and party and that it draws the very benefit from its authority.
On the one hand – the first thesis – science is the most direct access to the real. It does not matter what real: the most irreducible, the most incomputable – Identity or the One, rather than Being. It does not matter what access or givenness: it is the reality of this thought of Identity, the most adequate thought to it. “Adequate” means at least that it is capable of leaving it be without affecting and transforming it. Being the only knowledge which thinks the real without claiming to transform it, science does not lack it either in the very gesture of knowing it. If ontology is each time co-determined and fulfilled by a local theory – mathematics, physics, biology, etc. – the thought-of-the-real-One is only fulfilled by the very essence of Science-with-a-capital-S [la science], through the scientific posture rather than through such and such local sequence abstracted from knowledge.
This thesis implies or supposes another one – all of this is undivided or unbreakable: the displacement of the real of the last instance, which passes from Being to the One. Science contributes with it its own criterion of truth and its own concept of the real, which is simpler, more irreducible than philosophy’s concept.
It is a question of Science-with-a-capital-S, its essence-of-science, qua object that is absolutely consistent and susceptible to a new discipline; it is in no way a question of a particular science that one supposes complete and what one supposes then to be Science-with-a-capital-S. If ontology is written in the works of mathematics and is consigned under the form of completed and obsolete theories, the sufficient thought of the real is written in the immanence of the scientific process: not such and such regional theory, gripped then by fundamental philosophy, but the being-theoretical of theory, which is a real and describable “object.” More than the reconciliation of thought and knowledge, more than a particular science and the essence of science, it is a question of their identity – it is not their synthesis or their totality.
Two programmes are then imbricated and overlap:
1) A new science – of the One – is possible.
2) If the real postulated by science is the One, or Identity, then a science of the One is also a science of the essence of every science. The elaboration of a rigorous discipline of Identity is equally the description or manifestation – theoretical rather than epistemo-logical – of what is proper to all science. Through the cause of the last instance, through its immanence, science is auto-description or, better yet, the non-philosophical description (of) itself.
Finally – the third thesis – no philosophy is no longer necessary to relate science to the real, it is no longer necessary to repeat this relation in its meaning or its truth and to ground it. This intervention of philosophy is only necessary if it is in fact already substituted with science itself and that in lieu of leaving it to its own work, it begins through separating it from what it can do, by breaking its identity – the identity of thought and Identity – placing between them (where there is not one) a distance or an exteriority of the philosophical type (a dyad, a unity of contraries) which is called, “spontaneously” we believe, the good offices of philosophical mediation. Philosophical mediation “thematizes” their relations, elucidates it, grounds it, redistributes the priorities and the privileges, deconstructs them. This rigged game divides science and the real, thought and knowledge, the sciences and their essence, according to a cleaving line which is not scientific. If science is related to the real itself, which is no longer Being but the One-without-Being, then necessarily it knows itself as this relation and has no need of being grounded by philosophy, demonstrating rather how philosophy, in which Being is the cradle, keeps itself away from the One.
The philosophies and the epistemologies are in every way globally contrary to the phenomenology of science. One must leave it to assume itself, to describe and think itself under the form of a science, a transcendental and absolute science, but “particular” too as the particular science [la science particulière] of the One. If, on the other hand, the specificity of philosophy is its relation to science, it is not only that each new important discovery acts on it in a “revolutionary” way and demands it to reground itself; that is above all what is constituted as the repression of science.
We should identify and describe the point of absolute misunderstanding, of impossible communication, between philosophy and science. These are some of their symptoms:
- The obligation where philosophy is always to treat science “after the fact,” to give it the form of a fact completed after where philosophy alone can intervene to give science its meaning and truth retroactively;
- Science as the principal motor, most often explicit or unseen, of the mutations of philosophy; if there is a “history of Being,” that is, a history of metaphysics, its real motor is the production of scientific knowledge;
- Science as material, not unique but principal material, of philosophy; the obligation for philosophy to begin through knowledge rather than art (even Nietzsche: philosophy is an ontology of the multiple, to the dominant aesthetic perhaps but not a first aesthetics; the “metaphysics of the artist” remains a metaphysics in a dominant way).
- The dividing operation of philosophy over science, which is required as what procures philosophically utilizable knowledges, but repressed as what might claim to think.
These phenomena are the symptoms – in the space of philosophy – of the impossible philosophical comprehension of these relations. We will not conclude above all in the contemporary way that science is the Other of philosophy and can help in deconstructing ontology. This would be to lead back to the philosophical operation under the form of a quasi-analysis of it through the scientific “unconscious.” We must comprehend this impossible relation rather as an effect from philosophy’s perspective, while a science of these relations will seize on them, on their philosophical impossibility, as an index of problems to resolve through science, not through analysis.
All of the unsolvable questions of epistemology and the philosophy of sciences cease being in effect aporia and give place to solvable problems from which they are treated as index and symbolic supports of an elucidation of its essence. From there, the One as the pure transcendental reality, not an ontological one, is placed at the center of these problems. One qua One explains the philosophically paradoxical phenomena of science and dissolves them:
1) If all of science, in particular the theory and its relation to theoretico-experimental data, is given in the last instance on a very special mode, which we will call unreflected [or uncontemplative, irréfléchi] or non-decisional (of) itself, specific to the One itself, we will explain then that science would be a “flat” or unreflected [or uncontemplative] thought, deaf and blind from side to side, to the symbolic support – and nevertheless consistent as a theoretical thought, existing on the mode of an original being-theoretical irreducible to the data combinations. They are precisely these phenomenal traits which are scandalous for philosophy.
2) If science is more than a coherent dreaming, if it is this “dreaming” but real qua unbreakable process, it is all the more real as this immanent process and deprived of objects finding its cause of the last instance in reality in the strict sense, in the power (of) thought which is the One.
3) The aporia and conflicts of the epistemologies or philosophies of science finally appear as they are: the conflicts of philosophical images, appearances which weave the transcendental illusion in which epistemology is nurtured. There is an amphibology of all concepts of epistemology: their philosophy-form itself.
Science as the real critique of the philosophy-form or capital-form of thought
Instead of deducting from science a new local sequence of knowledge and generalizing it in the philosophical mode, decreeing, for example, that Newton’s work or Cantor’s work is ontology, indeed, ontology itself, we here leave science to describe itself within its essence, independently from the particular knowledges that it produces. From there, from within its practice, we can perceive what relation that it maintains with philosophy independently from what philosophy believes. Yet, the point is not a simple inversion. We substitute the philosophical use of science for the scientific use of philosophy. Exposed in its radicality, this relation excludes all positivism, which would only be a survival of philosophy. The purest, the most immanent transcendental use of philosophy is the fact of science, at least when it, reduced to the power (of) thought, is itself delivered from all philosophical prejudice. Our problem is therefore no longer to philosophically utilize science. It is to think with science, flush with the power (of) thought that it supposes – its cause of the last instance – and to order philosophy to this knowledge. Rather than a philosophical pragmatics of science which would relate it to a system of finalities foreign to its essence, science is here left as is [se laisse être] as science and describes its essence and its relation of a new type to philosophy.
If the cosmo-polito-logical paradigm is the internal and unsurpassable form of philosophy, that it can only deconstruct in reposing and retracing it, science introduces into thought another paradigm which suspends the capital-form of philosophy: the Universe. Here, the Universe is a transcendental and not an empirical concept, and a concept of thought rather than a concept of things. It does not designate scientific cosmology, but the specific theoretical space of science, qualitatively different from philosophy’s, more universal than it and which can eventually be occupied by cosmological knowledges. Science is a thought outside the World, but in a necessary reference to it, so that now, we will take our norms and our models of the Universe that science implicitly poses rather than the cosmological order. If one wants – but it is a model among others – it is a matter of an acosmic and generalized stoicism – a non-stoicism. And among many other things: a science of capital in thought.
Science and philosophy have in common being generalizations of already produced knowledges or understandings [de savoirs ou de connaissances]. Yet, it is hardly a “common point.” For, if the knowledges are already produced, they are so by science alone. This authorizes science to use philosophy as simple materials to produce more universal knowledges and which does not divide or separate them from their process. This does not justify philosophy in appropriating them, breaking them from the power (of) thought and universalizing them on philosophy’s own mode, which is moreover less universalizing because, even here, philosophy breaks universalization from what it can do. The procedure of universalization of theories is not the same for science to philosophy, and philosophy impedes, through its concepts, categories and its transcendentals (which are as much closures as openings) the full deployment of scientific theoretical universality, that is, always concrete universality.
To the contrary, science produces of the theoretical, under the laws of simple immanence, the Identity of the power (of) thought, rather than under that of the fold of Being and auto-position. Science produces objectivity, but it does not objectivate a second time: an absolutely flat objectivity, without reflexive depth, but that science displaces continuously by returning its existent forms to the state of material and support. Therefore, science and perhaps also all of the “situations of immanence” (not only the laboratory, but the courtroom and the trial, for example, when it concerns the law) – produce the theoretical, but simple without the refolding where the philosophical would come and lodge itself. Philosophy can only hallucinate a folded nature of scientific objectivity. They produce the theoretical and, in the same gesture, its generalization. Science does not produce knowledge which would not be from the outset already more universal than another knowledge, while philosophy must dissociate the identity of knowledge – that it “particularizes” and “empiricizes” – and its universality – that it attributes to itself. Philosophy breaks the power (of) thought of what it can do and lives from this alienation and closure, it consumes knowledge that it does not produce and produces with it the universality in which the type is foreign to that of knowledge.
The science of the essence of science: as science of the One
The One, Being, the Other: these categories – the greatest ones – designate in philosophy objects where there is no science, wherein no science has been possible despite the classical formulae “science of Being” and “science of the One.” Yet, they are for us term-indicators, materials and utterly symbolic supports for a new science, which is, like all science, neither sought in the way of the “science of Being” nor possible: this science is real but must become effective as the science of the essence of science. They are ontological indications of non-ontological problems.
These three possible elements of thought define three great types of thought. All of them are found together in each type, according to different distributions, in accordance with the dominant or principal place of one of them. Being is the element of philosophy and auto-position which subordinates the One and the Other to it. Philosophy is the perspective of Being left to itself and unbound. The Other is the element of the Judaic or even Greco-Judaic type of thoughts: the deconstructions of metaphysics (Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Derrida). These are still philosophies, but inverted or against the grain [à rebours], the Other striking the falling of Being and the One, another way that Being would not submit itself to the Other and the One: a fall without possible recovery. To the encounter of the “returns-to…” which make up the conservative everydayness of philosophy – a return to Descartes, a return to Kant, a return to Plato, etc. – we must continue to say that the deconstructions have inaugurated a really new epoch of thought, wherein the specificity is the Greco-Judaic conflict, the impossible and forced insertion of the Other qua Other in the Greek structures of ontology. If this invention has not yet produced all of its effects, it remains limited by its attachment to philosophy and to Being in which it continues to presuppose the validity and pertinence, when this would only be to deconstruct them. The One remains, which has not given place – as such, qua One and qua element of thought – to any philosophy. Neo-Platonism has only developed the One’s philosophical concept, endorsing its submission to Being, that is, to Transcendence.
The One qua One is nevertheless the element of a thought that is absolutely consistent, a territory forbidden to philosophy. Indeed, this thought of the One is not to invent but to discover, it exists already under a form which is precisely seized on the original mode of the One: known in an opaque, unreflected [or uncontemplative] way, non-thematic and nevertheless non-implicit. It is science itself which is this immense territory: to manifest as it is without claiming to change it. The One qua One modifies the economy of Being and the Other, of the Entity [or Being, Étant] too. Becoming first or principal, the One ceases from being dominant in the way of Being, instituting rather from other instances to it an order, specific to science and which distinguishes it as much from the deconstructions of metaphysics as metaphysics itself. The One liberates from Being and the Other: it is science liberated globally from philosophy and its deconstructions. This new economy of knowledge and thought, this Universe of science vaster than the World of philosophy, is what the research programme baptized “non-philosophy” explores.
But what does it mean that the One would be treated as a scientific problem?
On the one hand, we find in philosophy the theme of the “science of the One” – a science which has failed in several ways – and we treat this theme, and the connected themes, from the outset not as solutions nor even as questions, but as simple indicators of philosophical unresolved problems. A science can use philosophy as an old and available theoretical material which completes by acquiring the status of a symbolic entity serving as support for new representations that it forms with its help and which are knowledges of the One.
On the other hand (and it explains the former or makes it intelligible), we do as if we were from the outset “outside” of philosophical sufficiency without having to exit from it. We ask ourselves how to establish this new science, like any science and with its means, without further taking a model from philosophy. This implies that we immediately treat philosophy as an index and a symbolic support, using the philosophical material by depriving it of its spontaneous, obvious authority over itself.
Touching the One – this old impossible project of philosophy – our model is indeed from the outset that of science “itself” or as it exists – a science of the One rather than a supplementary metaphysics of the “question of the One.”
On this new object that philosophy “aporiatizes” [«aporétisé»] without providing any knowledge of it, how can we assume this scientific posture rather than a philosophical decision? How does one introduce “within” the continuity of the discourses on the One a scientific “break” which opens an infinite possibility of investigations? A non-philosophical break, a break of a first science, is no longer an essential decision: it is an effect, the effect of a necessary assumption of the real. There is a consent of science to the real, and it is a consent still anterior to every decision-of-consent. It is nothing other than the “self-assumption” [s’assumer «soi-même»] under the kinds of the cause (of) science; an assumption which, in man, is identical to the cause or to the last instance (of) science. Let’s call this the power (of) thought. From there, the proper and solitary names in which the history of science is punctuated rather than the schools, positions and traditions of philosophy. Man as power (of) thought is a scientific automaton and defines his humanity in the limits where he is not a “scientist” (obviously) but a man (of) science.
For example, what distinguishes us in a primitive as much as definitive way from the deconstructions which are the latest epoch of philosophy? We do not claim to a first, even “affirmative” critique or a deconstruction of philosophy – a first “deconstruction” in the philosophical sense of the word. We do not place ourselves at the limit – at the de-limitation and on the possible borders with philosophy. Is this to say that we claim to “exit from philosophy,” by globally exiting, through some Young-Marxian Ausgang? Immediately, without preparations, presuppositions or preliminary critiques, we hold onto the interior of a relation other to philosophy, in the immanence of a scientific relation to philosophy and despite these inevitable protestations which we must rather “analyze.” The Principle of Sufficient Philosophy is already inoperative the exact moment we manifest it and show it to the community of philosophers. We do not above all “exit” from philosophy with philosophy’s means…in pretending to construct from the exterior, with the related pieces, a science of the One which would be a positivist remake[2] of ontology. We assume concerning the One, which is the real par excellence – unable in a way done otherwise, not more than whatever scientist – the immanence of the “posture” specific to sciences in the real and in knowledge, and we leave it to describe itself without projecting onto it a philosophical decision. It is to create from all of the pieces a new science having the One, Being, the Other and the Entity [or Being] for “objects”; it is a science which does not yet exist in an effective manner, but wherein the construction of it is reduced to manifestation – effective with the help of philosophy – of its structures, structures which are unconstructable and undeconstructable, which are therefore manifested as they are. And it is only from the interior of this science which the original relation is described that it has always maintained with philosophy, even if we do not know of an effective or realized (not “thematic” or “explicit,” which would return to a hermeneutic use). What is then discovered as knowledge – knowledge of philosophy as the “objective givens” of a science of the One – is that philosophy has never played another role in this science than those as material, index, and symbolic support of its universal representations.
Therefore, there exists an extrinsic causality – that of immanence itself – over philosophy. Some philosophers have only admitted, to then limit, the scope of the wound, reducing it, for example, to that of the Other, comparing it to an Unconscious. Philosophical immanence is only partial and a semi-immanence, always blended or affected by transcendence, this way being the most “natural”: to compound [aggraver] alterity, deconstructing philosophy, the easiest solution, would not destroy its most profound and oldest claims. The only extrinsic but transcendental causality over philosophy, which would be possible or non-contradictory with philosophy but only giving rise to its resistance, is that of science, because its principle is pure immanence, not affected simultaneously with transcendence.
On the One as cause and how scientific theory manifests it
A transcendental science which is at the same time the theory of the proper to all possible science is undoubtedly a theory for absolute groundings. But rather than “groundings,” one must now, and in this particular case, speak of “cause” or “last instance” rather than a grounding. Grounding is a philosophically charged concept: the grounding is de jure divided, deferred/differed [différé] even, in a relation or coupled way (“ontotheo”-logy), while cause is what remains “in itself” without being affected by its effect. The cause is therefore the nothing-but-One which is identity from side to side. Science, in general, and regardless of its region of objects, is without grounding but is not without cause or One. Therefore, science does not float in nothingness but rather directly manifests the real in its identity.
How does one think the One qua One? Insofar as it must be thought as cause and not as an object in the philosophical sense of the word, science thinks the One in itself but by its effects: and, it is science itself as a theoretical representation. But, science thinks the One as it is, without which its theoretical effect can claim to modify it, manifesting it rather in its original essence of Identity or radical immanence. This effect is therefore not effectivity or “Being” [Etant] in a new, not ontological sense, of the word, but is the theoretical representation which uses effectivity to indicate through this operation the real as its cause or its determination in the last instance, and to indicate it in its existence and very nature. The relation of the cause-One and the effect-science is here the phenomenal or real kernel of deductibility.
Science is a representation which relates itself to the real, to the power (of) thought, without the mediation of logic or any other organon; therefore, it relates itself to the real directly. And it does so, however, only relating itself to the real in the last instance, therefore eliminating every “mystical intuition.” The exclusion of logic is here so radical only because it is in reality of the philosophical logos and of every degraded form of the logos. This philosophical paradox of an immediate or adequate thought, but one which only manifests the real in the last instance, is explained by the very nature of the real here in question, the power (of) thought, which is an Identity lived qua Identity.
Indeed, once admitted that matter does not reflect and draws the consequences of this thesis – to know that it is not either a piece of lava on the moon, for one such object is of a reflected form, a mode of objectivation – one must admit that it is a pure internal given qua given, and in which the essence of a wholly “interior” power and “immanence” grounds its being-absolutely-given. And then to admit that if there is a representation of this real, which only dwells in itself outside of every ontological horizon, it takes the form of a reflection which has nothing in common by definition with what it reflects; that the “reflection” is not objectivating; that there is not, from the power (of) thought to its effect as theoretical representation, the “common form” of a mirror. Theory is only necessary in the way of an absolute risk, without continuous grounding and surely in the real, which only determines it in the last instance.
The posture or essence of science gives place to a true thought, the thought proper to science insofar as it relates itself to Identity, to the real itself. It knows itself as such and describes its own phenomenality; it knows itself as non-philosophical, anterior or first in relation to philosophy; it finally shows from where philosophy is the blind victim of a transcendental appearance. This power of description (of) self of science – of the scientific posture rather than knowledges and methods of such and such science – immediately demonstrates the illusory character of the pretensions of philosophy as to the real, the transcendental appearance which nurtures the philosophies of science and epistemology.
It does not suffice in saying that science is a process-without-subject for this raising of the subject will spontaneously give a positivist and anti-idealist (anti-Kantian) interpretation through an ultimate reference to philosophy. Science is but a process without-subject because it is, in a more positive way, a process-in-cause [un processus-à-cause] and that it even possesses a transcendental cause (of) itself. Only science realizes this monster or this “philosophical error” (Husserl) of being a transcendental but very real dimension to be a subject, or not being that of a cause. Although being the cause, it is too immanent too to not be at the same time transcendental. It can therefore absolutely describe itself without resorting to the idealism of auto-foundation; since, being a process-without-subject, it is nevertheless (transcendental) in-cause-(of)-itself [à-cause-(de)-soi]. It does not pose itself in order to be, but is determined in the last instance by the real which is the cause (of) itself, rather than an auto-positional subject.
Further, it does not suffice in saying that it is a process-without-object (in the philosophical sense), yet this formula can serve as an indication, for we then risk giving an interpretation that is this time an idealist interpretation of science. It is only a process without-object because it is, here still, “in-cause” or “in-determination-in-the-last-instance” [à-détermination-en-dernière-instance], its cause being its genuine “object.” The cause of one such force [or power] – the power (of) thought itself – that it transforms what is first presented to it in the object-form or philosophy-form in simple material, index and symbolic support which loses the object-form and are integrated on this mode within the process of knowledge. Science is immanent: this does not mean that it has no necessary reference to “objective givens” or “phenomena.” Rather, it is that these data enter science only by losing this object-form or this factum-form, donning other functions which are specific to science. This is necessary consequently, but of an internal or transcendental necessity, in lieu of being of an empirical or “found” necessity and which would only have value in the limits of “experience,” that is, the philosophical concept of experience.
Adequation and mysticism
If philosophy is a techno-logy of distribution, if “Being” is this share [part faite] to things and thought, science is the manifestation which proceeds from side to side [de part en part]; knowledge is the identity which refuses distribution between thought and the object and definitively installs itself in adequation. The philosophical deconstructions of adœquatio in the name of differe(a)nce are not even superficial; they are illusory, internal to an appearance and ground themselves in the ignorance of scientific adequation, in an already philosophical image of adequation. They prove nothing and only “interpret.”
Science is the absolutely undivided identity of surfaces and the internal, the horizontal platitude and the immanent real. They do not overlap each other; they do not prevent each other in a formless [informe] blend and without any other form than that of the blend. They always give themselves as identical but without synthesis, or “separately,” as identity (of) the real and as identity (of) surface – this is the “determination in the last instance.”
A science of the One, manifesting the essence-of-thought of all science, thus liberates the positivity of the unreflected [uncontemplated]. The unreflected [uncontemplated] of science is no longer the limit nor even the Other of philosophical reflection: it becomes internal, defining a positive mode of phenomenality, and remains utterly identical to the essence of science. This is more than interiorization of an empirical and transcendent unreflected [or uncontemplated]: it is the very essence of the Given or Manifested, the power (of) thought as cause of science. Perhaps we can say that it has become the “transcendental subject” but this would be to confuse it with the Neo-Kantian thesis according to which science is this transcendental subject. It is a necessarily idealist and philosophical thesis which gives a logical content to the transcendental and grounds itself onto the auto-position of science.
Science is a hyper-phenomenology: it does more than “saving the phenomena” and does more than tearing them from their empiricity to insert them under philosophical legislation which only “saves” them by alienating them. Science leaves them be to the contrary as “pure” phenomena, without a thickness or border of the logos; science saves them from their philosophical capture. The phenomena are flat, horizontal thoughts without horizon. The description of phenomena as that which is prima facie given as manifest from side to side, rejects phenomeno-logy in all the amphibological depths of metaphysics. Science is the science of phenomena and guards them from phenomeno-logy. Science is condemned to this poor and minimal thought, which does not have the means to dream, in which we will not say that science is itself symbolic, but rather that science is a representation so flat, so deprived of reflexive depth and folds, that it has need to find in experience a support, which takes the symbolic form in general as inert invariants deprived of meaning. It is a thought even more mute than the “ante-predicative experience,” so definitively silent that it cannot be a question of bring it about in any expression whatsoever, but to another thought just as mute and which will add its silence to its own.
That being said, we seem to give science the scope of a mystical effusion in the things. If science has a mystical dimension, it is only on the side of its cause, by the internal nature of the cause, its radical immanence, and not through its effects; through its essence as exstasis-without-ecstasy [exstase-sans-extase] more than through the theoretico-experimental labour that this realist posture makes possible. Between mechanics and mysticism, there is a common point that science inhabits, this adequate thought to its object which draws its nature from the power (of) thought. Without being the play of socio-political and theoretical forces [forces] to which positivism intends to reduce it, science is of an unreflected [uncontemplated] and blind nature, a nature that is non-decisional (of) itself, from a power [force], but from a power (of) thought which, because it is not itself theory, is capable of producing or manifesting theory.
If science defines the black continent of thought – black from side to side in its flat horizontality without opening – it maintains strange affinities with mysticism:
1) Science, perceived in philosophical exteriority, through its epistemological images, seems to be a “mysticism of experience,” an exstasis-without-ecstasy in the empirical, always disillusioned and always renascent.
2) Codified mysticism and mysticism lived in its turn through the religious prism is given as a “science” of the most interior real, a purely transcendental “science” of the soul in its identity – but which is aground [échoue], even here, onto an utterly transcendent real; or a science which is only reached at the very transient point of an effort which is resolved in abandonment.
3) These affinities already contradict the gross intellectualist and superficial opposition of the Enlightened [Lumières] and the mystical.
4) It suffices (but is necessary) to deliver science from its epistemological rags [oripeaux] and mysticism from its religious bindings [liens], to extricate the real kernel or immanence of both, to discover not that science and mysticism are identical or the same – this is an absurd statement if any – but that there is a reason of the last instance which explains these very strange affinities that philosophy hastens to repress them.
The recourse to the One, rather than to Being, is resented by philosophy like a “philosophical error.” It only precludes the opacity of the One qua One throwing a more coherent and more extended light into the sciences than the sun of reason, insofar as the appeal to the One manifests the structures and the operations of science as they are or adequately so, without claiming to transform them. It leaves-them-be instead of turning them by force to philosophy and its finalities; the One communicates to science the power (of) thought which gives it is own sufficiency, the power to enlighten itself “from within.”
Theoretical intuition and the labour of science
Philosophy is a technics [or technique, technique] of extremely varying distinctions. However, they conserve a “family resemblance,” an unsurpassable invariant, what we call the dyad or the mixture, in which the universal form is the correlation of Immanence and Transcendence. These are the variable coordinates in their definition and relation, regardless of the objects which fulfill them. All of the distinctions which make up philosophies are variations on this mixture-form: they only disturb or distend and deform it to lead it back without ever breaking or exceeding it. Or, if they sometimes exceed it, as is the case in deconstructions, it is still to suppose it being the necessary and constitutive ultimate reference: they never claim to radically raise the pretensions.
This is not the case with science, in which we will say that in a sense it is more deconstructive than the deconstructions. In all knowledges that it produces, science places a cardinal, ultra-philosophical distinction between the being-theoretical and its material or symbolic support which, in a certain way, “falls” outside of it and which, if it is a necessary reference in its own way, it is not more constitutive than the being-theoretical for this reason. While philosophy remains enclosed in the closure of the dyad and redistributes the mixture-form without ever breaking it, science immediately exceeds it, or transcends, if we may say, philosophical transcendence. The first reproduces the dyad through “analysis,” “synthesis,” “dialectic,” “structure,” “difference”; the second produces from qualitatively different knowledge and in which universality and purity place it immediately outside of the mixture, the dyad-form, the correlation of Immanence and Transcendence.
Science therefore distinguishes as well. But, instead of doing it on the model of “formal,” “real,” “transcendental” distinctions, or through analysis, synthesis, etc., it does so through a qualitatively unequal or unilateral duality which only derives from Identity and which excludes all “unitary” synthesis, analysis or difference, soaring-over or hanging-over [de survol ou de surplumb]. It is a duality of the theoretical and the symbolic that nothing, no unity reconciles by coming back to a so-called “common strain.” It proves from the outset that the “judgment of knowledge” is neither an analytic nor synthetic a priori, but of the nature of this irreversible duality which suspends, in the state of simple symbolic support that is not constitutive, the theoretico-experimental data (including their immediate philosophical form). Science is hyperdyadic: it produces a “dyad,” if one wants, but wherein the second term is contingent and reduced to non-theoretical functions. This explains that the first term (theory) forms an absolutely unlimited space, that it does not close any amphibological identity with the contingent “symbolic” term. If, at least, it is adequately thought in its scientific being, the pure transcendental distinction of the theoretical and the symbolic no longer re-enters under the law of the mixture; it escapes from the start of the game – as is the case of all theoretical “discoveries” – from the philosophical law of the dyad, reciprocity or reversibility. The theoretical no longer transcends from the “ontic” material, in the philosophical way: it transcends “in-front” of it within an absolute priority that nothing can call back into question.
Thus, theory exists as it is: it is an a priori structure distinct from its effectively realized forms and the object of a genuine a priori theoretical intuition, in the sense only where one speaks of a categorial intuition, and to a proximal scientific displacement (uni-laterality) of it, not in some mystical sense. This theoretical-power [pouvoir-théorique] holds its cause of last instance, of the One, this power of transcending “in-front” of philosophy, or to reveal itself as already having preceded it, without nevertheless taking the form of an anticipation or a pro-jection [pro-jet]. It also explains complementarily that science does not therefore exhaust itself either in the formal and mechanical calculation, in algorithms and automata, that science is a true ideal, universal, relatively autonomous representation to theoretical validity; that there is finally an a priori theoretical intuition irreducible to the symbolic distributions (here, to the combinations of old theories and experimental data). The being-theoretical acquires, in science and through science alone, a distinction and an autonomy that neither leaves it to the philosophy of sciences nor to the logico-linguistic positivism, both confounding theoretical intuition and its symbolic support: one benefiting from the former, the other benefiting from the latter. This is the eternal amphibology of the logos, of the mixture of thought and language, which always casts back to the glory of philosophy and deprives science of all thought.
More concretely, the science of the One passes through two operations.
The one is first the production of an emergent “theory,” produced as a solution of a certain number of problems, formulated through a philosophical material, problems that it immediately exceeds through its universality. But, it is a theoretical solution created in its turn from new problems. The measure is therefore this: Let be the One qua One [soit l’Un en tant qu’Un]. What does it mean to think it as One then? When it would not take it as an “object,” how is a science possible? To say it otherwise still: the One theoretically exists first as a discovery or as a response, but is a naïve one, without the theory of this response yet existing. From the experimental and already scientific research of the requisites of philosophy itself or taken globally – a research effectuated consequently with the immanence of the One as the guiding thread, which can therefore alone “isolate” philosophy – thought arrives necessary to the thematic of science as it is. Thought discovers that the theoretical requisites of philosophy are the objects of a science and compel it to elucidate its own structures and to give them their general form.
In a general way, instead of thinking the One on the ultimate horizon of Being and trying to reconstitute it through exterior and subaltern functions like philosophy does, science treats the One as already given qua One in order to elucidate, on the basis of this theoretical given, the characters of thought or theory which “correspond” to it: adequately as a theory can do, and not from a deferred/differed [différée] “co-respondance” as is the case with Being.
The relation of science to philosophy is itself double: philosophy is first the index of a thought of the One posed as its ultimate requisite, the material to work on to produce a new theory which will explicitly be this science of the One that we seek; then, it is not more than the symbolic support of the generalized theory of the One. Let be the One [Soit l’Un]: how does one transform the problematic of philosophy to bring it to the state of adequate theory of this new “object” and what does it finally become within this science? This position of the problem of philosophy allows to rectify the very positivist first appearance which would indicate the project of a “science of philosophy.” In reality, this formula is the indication of a problem wherein the solution is formulable as follows: philosophy is the impellent material, the “objective givens” in some sort, or even the “phenomena” that a science of the One works on in view of producing an adequate representation of it.
The true distinctions therefore unsettle [débordent] the metaphysical and transcendent opposition of “theory” and “experience,” but perhaps as well the still very simple opposition of the theoretical and the symbolic. One must distinguish in sum the following phenomenal strata in the process of science:
1) The One as cause-through-immanence; Identity as “object” of the last instance of every science;
2) The being-theoretical of theory, the object of a specific intuition and structured according to a priori which are able to be inventoried through the philosophy-form but irreducible to it;
3) The phenomenal theoretical diversity, the data or the theoretico-experimental content as they are seized in theoretical immanence under the form of their radical identity and “chaotic” multiplicity as objects-of-knowledges;
4) This same theoretico-experimental content reduced to the state of symbolic support of representation.
A unified theory of science and philosophy
This research programme is “non-philosophy.” Yet, this term only knows it through its ultimate effects or its new relation to philosophy. Grasped at its base, it is called “first science.” From this point of view, and it is in this that science is a basis or an obligated point of departure, as science of the One or science of the essence of science, defines the universal plane of immanence of every other real relation to experience and to the types of experience (economy, ethics, law, arts, technology, etc.) It is the degree 0 – but an absolutely positive degree 0, which can claim to be more than a model of others: their very cause – of the experience of thought. Even philosophy always begins through knowledge and, most often, science which must provide this knowledge. Even philosophy, which nevertheless supposes science blind, deprived of meaning and truth as long as it does not help it, supposes science as its Other. We know it, one must see it, in the erection of science as fact or faktum, the symptom or the indication of the unavoidable position of science in “being.”
Science is not the underside or the verso of philosophy, its remainder or even an Other which, with rigor, would show to philosophy that the real does not belong to it in totality precisely because it would want to possess the real in this way. The real, the Identity which is but Identity, precedes the Whole, and is not a debris or a remainder of it. Science does not postulate the real negatively or does not let if affect as an “im-possible,” an “in-consistent,” or “in-divisible.” This is always to seize it or to release it through the prism of the phenomenon of the possible, consistency, and divisibility. Science is the “paradox” of a completely outside real-One thought and which, nonetheless, has its cause in it. This paradox, which excludes community and alienation, is that of the “determination in the last instance” – the only type of causality which the Individual as it is would be capable of.
Measured to philosophy, to its criteria of the real and thought, non-philosophy, as first science, is against the tide of the epoch. Philosophy in general, the contemporary especially, develops the side of the dyad, its primacy over the One – or over the image of the One that gives this type of duality which is indefinitely diminished [démultiplie] and which regularly announces with the greatest seriousness that it just “killed” the One. The problem of the criminals who produce philosophy is that they are always simulators and less great criminals than they let know. From there, their escalation in this impossible assassination against the real which turns into torture, as is always the case with the “insane.” Of course, if science rather develops the One and if it finds it is element, it is no longer a matter of the philosophers’ One, the One-in-a-dyad-, in a regime of duality, but of the One-in-One or of the vision-in-One. The two sources of thought, the two experience of the One do not overlap in some imaginary focal point nor do they arrive from the highest and most withdrawn “common strain” than the two. All of what science can say against this unitary ambition of philosophy is that philosophy postulates and “represses” the One or the real such that science is the adequate representation of it. The One which does not want to die by the blows of philosophy is not the One “qua One” but the One-totality, the One-unity.
With science, its Universe, the infinite inequality that it imposes onto the World, man recognizes that he has never been this being-in-the-World that philosophy represents him as. He does not disengage himself from the World, in which he has never been really alienated, but from philosophy – that is, from the World still and its statuses – which had made him believe that he was embedded within it. Science liberates us by manifesting as it is what is more than our strangeness in the World: our precession “over” it, our absolute priority over the anonymity of things and the thought of things. This precession of the power (of) thought over philosophy itself suffices in revealing it as it is to reveal, at the same time, the resistance of philosophy and its claim which acts only in auto-dissimulation. Of course, this is so on condition of therefore comprehending it in its essence; science only liberates us from the World, that is, from philosophy, from their closure, by giving them leave [congé], moving them away and “unequalizing” them rather than tearing us from them.
Since there are two sources and a not unitary theory of thought, two sources and nevertheless a unified theory of thought, implies several theses:
1) The end of the pretensions of philosophy – always unitary pretensions – over itself and over science; the suspension of images that it gives of science instead of giving it reality, that is, Identity.
2) The conservation of the philosophical type of thought in its integrity as decision and position; in the integrality of its nature as blend or mixture; in the totality of its mechanisms and its operations. There is no positivist reduction of philosophy here – precisely because we have begun with refusing every philosophical reduction of the One – : it does not belong to science in denigrating or overvalorizing its object as philosophy does of its own and science in particular, but of supposing, to the contrary, that it continues being that which it is. The only point from where science intervenes – but it is inevitably so – in its objects or its data is that of their spontaneous philosophical pretensions, that it suspends in order to liberate them from their genuine functions in the process of knowledge. It is an intervention absolutely analogous (but adapted to the context of the transcendental theory of science) to the “relations of incertitude.” Here, it signifies that it is impossible to sustain all of the properties and phenomena together, under the form, at least, where philosophy tries to do so spontaneously. And even science requires that we choose between the scientific grasp or even the philosophical grasp over phenomena, but it is impossible to think both together. This non-Heisenbergian universalization of the “relations of incertitude” is not only possible, but necessary as soon as, leaving physics, that is, a field of particular objects, we pass onto the transcendental science, that is, onto this other science, “particular” in its own way, which has the essence of science as object.
3) The inclusion of philosophy in a science – here the science of the One – an inclusion under non-unitary conditions, since philosophy in its entirety is treated under the scientific functions of index, material and symbolic support. It is this very science of the One which imposes to treat the philosophical residue under this triple function. Philosophy passes from the state of logos to the state of symbolic support of the scientific representation of the One. This is what completes in realizing the non-unitary unity of thought.
[1] In English in the original.
[2] In English in original
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