The Scientific Theorem of Ordinary Sufficiency
François Laruelle
Selections from Pourquoi pas la philosophie? 5 (February 1985), p.26-36
The Theorem of the Sufficient Ordinary
Therefore, we call “ordinary” the perspective of the real, the real as a finite transcendental experience, and the real as the immediate subject (of) itself, a non-thetic subject (of) itself. But we also call “ordinary” the order of the real or original domains of experience, the order of “uni-laterality” or the order of “determination in the last instance.”
The ordinary thus has a broad sense and a narrow sense. In the broad sense, the ordinary designates the general point of view or the paradigm that elsewhere and according to the contexts we call minoritarian, individual or finite, with the intention of entirely distinguishing it from a philosophico-unitary perspective over the real, namely, here, over the undivided [individu]. Hence, the expression “ordinary man,” a solitude deprived (by positive sufficiency) of their philosophical attributes or anthropological predicates. In the narrow sense, the ordinary designates the specific order of the real or the immediate givens, what elsewhere and according to the contexts we call “uni-lateral” or “determination in the last instance,” with the nuance to entirely distinguish it from a particular philosophical order (syllogism, dialectic, the order of reasons, transcendental analytic, structure, difference, etc. …). Hence, the very word “ordinary” to comprehend on the model of the sententious argumentation, a troparia, etc. …: the ordinary is the possibility of all orders in a special order, unique in its kind, proper to the sole real as the “determination in the last instance.” The ordinary is not just any order of experiences and thoughts. The ordinary is above all not one of these attempts of the rationalization or logicization of a real assumed to be amorphous and chaotic which is essentially unitary philosophical enterprise. The forms of the philosophical order are, indeed, either rationalizations (calculating/historical, strategic/narrative rationalizations) of an a priori real falsified by philosophy, or alterations of these rationalizations. Yet the real is not at bottom a threatening amorphous diversity, postulating or requiring a philosophical legislation, a co-operation or an intervention which (without being ex machina) remains partially exterior to the real. The real is anterior to the philosophical distinction of syntax and the real; the real is already by itself, or non-positionally, a specific order which (or who) [qui] has no need to be constituted by philosophy.
The real and the order (of) the real are identical or are strictly the same experience, the essence of any possible order, and order is reduced to uni-laterality or irreversibility. The ordinary is the intimate, irrecusable, nothing-but-subjective experience of order. It is order in its finitude. Philosophy does not know the finitude of the real order, namely irreversibility or uni-laterality; philosophy knows orders penetrated by infinity, partially imaginary or transcendent and that it strives to impose or impinge with its customary violence upon man who is the real order to which the World surrenders [se plie] without violence.
The ordinary is in a certain way the proper rigor of the immanent phenomenal givens. Therefore, we will see, it is the foundation of a rigorous transcendental science of man. Yet, the ordinary is also the “object” of science wherein it is the non-positional subject (of) itself (or oneself): it is through an objectivated or transcendent ob-ject on the philosophical mode, but precisely, this non-thetic criterion of immanent phenomenal givens. The ordinary is therefore the subject for a rigorous science. Hence, the possibility of stating “theorems” about it which describe its (or their) purely “theoretical” phenomenal content (cf. the following section), like this theorem of the Sufficient Ordinary: it is not the ordinary which (or who) is the Other of philosophy, it is philosophy which is the Other of the ordinary, or another form of this theorem: the ordinary is the order (of) the real which (or who) rules philosophy itself, the ordinary is what (or who) determines the philosophical in the last instance and what philosophy finds in the ordinary a “superior principle.”
Indeed, the ordinary for philosophy is at best a predicate, the non-philosophical predicate. Here, the ordinary is not a predicate in general, and it is not the predicate of the not-(yet)-philosophical [non (encore) -philosophique] in particular. Far from being a moving, undetermined and residual figure, the ordinary precedes the philosophical calculation of qualities, attributes or predicates: it is not the ordinary which (or who) is ante-predicative in relation to it. The ordinary is the non-thetic essence or subject (of) itself (oneself) – and it is the philosophical which is the “predicate” – rather, the postdicate – of the ordinary. The ordinary is the irreversible order which (or who) wills the philosophical to come after the ordinary or would be a postdicate of the ordinary, etc. …
The Ordinary as the Foundation of Science:
1) Its Theoretical Functions
The ordinary in the finite sense has precise and essential theoretical characters.
1) The ordinary is naïve rather than reflexive; it is deprived by a positive sufficiency – this is an essential trait and of a foundation nature – of philosophical circularity, its operativity and technology. There is no placement of the ordinary outside-of-the-circle: the ordinary is immediately the non-circular, the irreversible and the non-positional (of) itself (oneself), and it then has the effect to place the philosophical outside-of-the-circle itself. From this perspective, the ordinary is a transcendental and not empirical naivety: it is not projected/excluded/interiorized/displaced by philosophy. The ordinary is the rock of rigorous science, which holds the subject (of) science in a proximity with things without equivalent in philosophy and thus a priori grounds the reality of a rigorous description of the immanent phenomenal givens of experience. The ordinary does not raise from a topological proximity, from an undecidable game of positions and does not found one; the ordinary is the experience of the Thing “in itself” as the immediate given, a non-objective or non-positional givenness.
Therefore, the ordinary is the paradigm, and even the paradigm of a rigorous or scientific thought; the ordinary’s naivety is the naivety of science, which is empirical of course, but first transcendental like the science which is here in question – the ordinary is not that of everyday life. We must ground the philosophical on the ordinary, rather than marginalizing the ordinary by philosophy.
2) The ordinary is the experience deprived of the possible; the ordinary does not tolerate being a hypothesis or a supposition. We cannot do our part for it beside the “authentic real,” namely the philosophical one. Either the ordinary determines the philosophical itself in the last instance, or the ordinary is a phantasm, a unitary hallucination of reality. The ordinary is not anti- or pre-logical, but positively a-logical, in the sense that it makes of the logical, the logico-real, etc. …, a simple “postdicate.” The ordinary is the anhypothetical terrain, an absolute terrain rather than relative-absolute, a terrain that science moves on.
3) From its essence at least, the ordinary “excludes” the philosophical, but it does not exclude from its essence the theoretical to the contrary. It suits to dissociate the ordinary from the everyday and the practical, from the everyday pragmateia that is still somewhat transcendent, but not to dissociate the ordinary from the specific reality of theory. There will be an “ordinary-pragmatic” sphere, but pragmatics does not define the essence of the ordinary. The ordinary is not a quotidian and banal operativity, an obscure and raw operativity, a primary process at the limit of meaning and logos. Albeit indeed deprived of the reflective and, at any rate, divided light of the logos, the ordinary is the contemplation, life and knowledge, a knowledge-without-objects, a non-thetic contemplation (of) oneself or radically subjective. The immanence of the ordinary explains that this would be a deaf and mute intentionality that is deprived of ob-jects and ob-jectivation, but not at all deprived of object or any content since the ordinary is the principle of any real science. Simply put the real, the essence, is never positional or thetic: hence, the radically theoretical and not practical essence of the ordinary. This theoretical essence of the ordinary would only appear as a paradox because we deprive the ordinary of its immanent phenomenal givens and we unitarily reduce the theoretical, theoria in its essence, to ontological ob-jectivation – the Greek falsification of theoria.
Finally, to sum up:
a) The ordinary does not have the structure of the ob-ject or stake, but has the structure of the non-thetic unreflected (of) oneself; the ordinary does not have the ob-ject consequently, but the immediate givens of experience as a correlate;
b) The ordinary is a dis-invested contemplation (of) the real. The ordinary is not a care, a concern, an interest in…, which implies a recurrence. The ordinary is a dis-interested and “objective” = real description;
c) Finally, the ordinary is a perspective which (or who) suspends any intervention in the real, any philosophical intervention under the pretext of making it arrive at its essence. The ordinary is the experience of the real as immanent or finite, as inalienable within an operation of knowledge. The ordinary is the experience of indivision as such or “as it is,” an experience which (or who) can never be transformed, produced or manifested in exteriority.
For these three reasons, the essence of the ordinary is theoretical rather than practical, describable rather than constructible. The essence of the ordinary is not alienated in the philosophical to return to itself. Philosophy is of a practical essence with theoretical aspects but it is never the deployment of the phenomenality of theoria. In its transcendental truth and far from being alienated in the possible, the inauthentic…or the authentic, the ordinary is what everything of finitude passes through [l’ordinaire est ce qui…transit tout chose de finitude], and finitude is by definition non-thetic: it is not an alienation. It is why the essence of the ordinary grounds the reality of a rigorous science of the finite subject or ordinary man.
2) The science of the “in itself” or the “As it is”
If it is no longer the effect of a philosophical operation, a donor of meaning, truth and value, the ordinary is furthermore not effectivity, “raw” or not. On one hand, it is precisely the ordinary in the radical sense of the word which allows one to reject philosophy in effectivity itself; through its entirely positive un-conscious or un-knowing, the ordinary denounces philosophical reflection and quasi-circularity as attributes of the World in a “broadened” sense of the word. On the other hand, the ordinary inserts effectivity in its turn within the real order. If the effectivity of the World is thus broadened by philosophy, it is because it is no longer idealized and worked on constitutively by philosophy: for the ordinary perspective, the World, its universal attributes and ob-jects are no longer gazed through the prism of philosophy, but finally given and contemplated in their in themselves, what we no longer call here their As Such, but their As They Are. The philosophical decision belongs to the World, and the world is henceforth given without one such decision to the finite subject and enters back into the real such that it is experienced radically immanently. This mode of unreflected givenness indeed excludes every ob-jectivation from its essence, and done so positively, without which ob-jectivation or representation would simply be displaced, altered or deconstructed. Ob-jectivation or representation must also return to the state of the simple given submitted to the ordinary or to the order of the non-thetic subject (of) oneself, and the aporetic circle of the subject and ob-ject rooted out [extirpé] from the finite subject and globally rejected into the “object” – a circle which was all at once of dogmatism, skepticism, and their critical “solution” which would simply consist in attempting a deciding [départageante] synthesis of two uses of the circle and thus reinforcing the domination of the circular or ob-jectivating paradigm of thought.
If the One does not give (itself) the World, effectivity, philosophy, etc. …, on the mode of an ob-jectivation, how does it give (itself) them precisely? The One gives (itself) them on the mode of a determination undoubtedly, but a determination which is “in the last instance.” Determination in the last instance is not a break, a supplementary transcendence, an inter-vention. Determination in the last instance excludes empirico-ideal or continuous transformation and production over the ob-ject – its ob-jectivation. Determination in the last instance is a determination which conserves the in itself. The ordinary individual [individu] is delivered from their masks and figures: the worker, the technician, the intelligent and cunning man, the dominator of nature. The ordinary individual receives the World with the minimum of possible transformation which would be thinkable and necessary so that there would still be a givenness of something = X for the finite subject. This obviously can be an ob-ject but it is not given as an ob-ject and modified in the operation of givenness. We will describe the specific content and effect of what we call “determination in the last instance” or again “uni-lateralization” later on precisely under the rubrics of “mysticism” and “pragmatics.” For the moment, we retain that the conducting wire of the ordinary is what allows one to ground a rigorous science or a theoretically grounded science, possessing a specific object: the real as the subject (of) itself, the real as man or undivided.
The ordinary in the transcendental sense is therefore what philosophy has never been: a pure experience of the in itself, an immediate givenness of the real in experiences which are all finally of an unreflected or non-positional essence (of) oneself. The uni-lateralizing determination, the last instance, has for sole effect (on two modes: mystical and pragmatic) the presentation or the giving of the World within an irreversible order after the subject who enjoys an absolute precession over the World precisely because the World can no longer ob-jectivate the subject. This irreversibility conserves the in itself of the World and even liberates the World from the jumble of masks and relations that the philosophical decision has thrown onto it.
Beyond ob-jectivation, all philosophical decoupages onto the World, without being destroyed – undergoing with the World, which is “broadened” by them – are suspended in the mode of the givenness of the World, namely in their own mode of givenness. The ordinary, as finite, has no need of the criteria of foreign recognition, exterior definitions, transcendent models: the ordinary coincides with no decoupages which is customary for philosophical operativity. “Everything” [Tout], any being, and philosophy itself is ordinary, but uniquely so because the Whole [Tout] itself raises from the ordinary order and no longer legislates on it, finding itself unilateralized by the ordinary order. The rupture of the Copernican Revolution, of the circle of the subject and the ob-ject by the subject that became radically finite, suffices to explain that the real and its mode of givenness would no longer be in continuity and no longer forming the circle of a reciprocal causality, and that the ob-ject itself would henceforth be given on a non-objectivating but unreflected mode: in its in itself. The World and its universal attributes (Language, Power, Society, State, Economy, Sexuality, etc. …) are announced without any prior decision-of-representation being necessary.
Of course, there will be a pragmatic experience specific to the finite subject, an acting on the World which could be called in its turn “ordinary” – we will describe it later on, but it necessarily comes after the One or the non-thetic subject, an acting that finds its essence in the One, that would obviously not transform it. Ordinary acting will furthermore not transform the World according to the habitual forms of practice. Transformation will be done on an unreflected, non-positional, and non-objectivating mode. There will be an original “ordinary practice” which will proceed by other paths than those of ob-jectivation and its modes: transformation of a raw material; industrial production; machinic functioning; ideal-exemplary, mechanical, final, material causalities, etc. … This ordinary, non-philosophical but real operativity will be a mode of determination in the last instance and it will also give the in itself of the World but in its own way without destroying the World, without transforming or negating it.
The ordinary is the experience of things not as such, in their being, their existence or in the horizon which serves them as a universal a priori, but the experience of things as they are or before their Being. A thing as it is is a thing naively grasped in its in itself or in its essence deprived of predicates, a thing which can therefore only be an undivided one. The ordinary implies the suspension of all of the predicates of the World and the experience of itself in its pure phenomenal content. The ordinary is never graspable in a universal horizon. The real is neither the empirical, nor the synthesis, nor the difference of the two. It takes no less than three neither/nors to eliminate the claims of philosophy and, precisely, to uni-lateralize or determine philosophy in its turn in the last instance. The real is the One as the non-positional or unreflected experience (of) oneself.
Consequently, a thought (of) the ordinary cannot be other than an experience of the term, an experience of its reality before its placement in relation. The unitary style recuses the possibility of this experience: it is based on a logical image of thought, and especially a logico-formal one (A = A), even if it means superseding it. The term is marginalized by philosophy as a simple index of a diversity or an exteriority within the interiority of relations. In reality, there is rather a non-thetic experience of the term par excellence, namely of the undivided, and it is the undivided which (or who) is the ordinary before its reprisal by philosophy which will try to immerge it in the indifference of relations. The ordinary is the non-positional experience (of) oneself insofar as it enjoys a precession without recurrence over the philosophical constructions which are not “abstract” but “transcendent” and “hallucinatory.”
One objection could be that this concept of the real reverses the modern, “Kantian” primacy of “form” over “matter” and reverts to the dogmatic primacy of “matter” over “form.” This is a superficial re-interpretation of what is in question, a philosophical falsification of the essence of the real or the ordinary insofar as it is experienced in itself on an absolute mode anterior to the unitary disjunction of matter and form, and anterior to the aporetic games to which the unitary disjunction gives rise. Strictly speaking, the ordinary is not a primacy of the Term over the Relation, but an immediate and sufficient givenness of the Term in its in itself, before the just as unitary disjunction of Term and Relation, and the in itself which concerns us is no longer dogmatism’s in itself that is still posed with the philosophical position (cf. Introduction).
Ordinary Man: Index Sui, Index Philosophiae
Ordinary man is the one for whom the human ceases being a predicate to become the essence, the non-thetic essence (of) oneself. Above all, ordinary man does not enter into competition with the Overman who is only the consummation of Anthropological Difference, Anthropological Difference’s re-affirmation as such, namely as included in the essence of the pre-human, the non-human, and the in-human…Nothing of such is included in the finite essence of man who, being non-thetic (of) themselves, neither includes nor excludes anything of the World, but experiences themselves from themselves. Ordinary man is deprived of the great predicates of the logos, power, technics, language, etc. … But this deprivation would remain a philosophical operation over itself, a game, an indecision, an aporia, if it was first and really would define man. In reality, man experiences themselves immediately as finite or sufficient before these predicates.
The ordinary is therefore the perspective which (or who) absolutely precedes the anthropo-logical or unitary perspective over man, the chance for the human who is sufficiently real by themselves to determine in the last instance the anthropological images themselves. The confusion of the human and the anthropological is the Greek defect of man: it is the anthropo-logical amphibology. From this perspective, ordinary means the absolute respect of the content within immanent human phenomenality that Unitary Philosophy and the Sciences of Man harbors or postulate without being able to honor it.
Now, if we consider the narrow meaning of the word “ordinary” – as the order of the real or the determination in the last instance – we understand why the non-“anthropo-logical” man, “ordinary” man is this measure of all things and the measure of Being itself: because ordinary man is in their essence the non-thetic measure (of) oneself, the immanent or absolute measure. The non-thetic science (of) ordinary man – since man is the prototype of the real or the real of the last instance, which is nearly the “contrary” of idealism – is the science of the transcendental or real order, the a-logical order anterior to all operations of “ordering.” Finite man is the exigent for irreversibility or uni-laterality: finite man affects the World and philosophy through uni-laterality, and it is finite man who is immediately by their essence the rigorous transcendental foundation of order. The ordinary experience is identically the experience of the ordinary: this is a transcendental deduction or experience of order. Hence, one can imagine a Principle of the Ordinary on the philosophical mode that one would oppose to the Principle of Sufficient Reason or the Principle of Sufficient Philosophy, the ordinary as more powerful – realer – than them. In fact, the Sufficient Ordinary, rightly because it orders the Principle of Sufficient Reason and the other principles of Reason, is not itself a principle but a “scientific” theorem. More foundational than the Principle of Reason, there is the ordinary as the sole kernel of real experience within Reason and as the foundation of any science. If the principle of philosophy is Reason-as-principle, then the principle of science, as we have said, is the ordinary, of course reduced to its real phenomenal content.
Consequently, since ordinary man would be the measure (of) all things, of the Whole itself and its philosophical staging, this finally means that man is the transcendental foundation (on a finite, real or non-philosophical mode) of all sciences, even the empirical ones, and philosophy. Ordinary man is index sui and index philosophiae. The proof will be given at the level of ordinary pragmatics. We shall see that the ordinary is the real a priori for philosophy or, if one holds this to a more rigorous distinction, the ordinary is rather the real in its transcendental truth which (or who) then grounds the a priori (cf. on ordinary pragmatics: non-thetic meaning and finite logic) of the World, philosophy included.
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