Translation of François Laruelle, “Research Programme for the Metaphysics of the Future” (1985)

Research Programme for the Metaphysics of the Future
François Laruelle
In Pourquoi pas la philosophie? 6 (October 1985), p.34-48

1. Opening Philosophy
There are no problems “in themselves” or “objective” problems. In general, the axes of research are programmed by the overdetermination of several factors: the official politics of science; the current state of knowledge; and, in the domain of the philosophy and sciences of society, the most general structure of the Philosophical Decision. For example, what the Collège international de Philosophie (CIPh) proposes is at the intersection of the Philosophical Decision, in which they are sorts of concrete transcendentals by their generality; and currently dominant historical forms of the Philosophical Decision: they express both a conjuncture and a certain dominant tradition within thought. Being given that this research programme (RP) no longer at all obeys this schema and does not trace a theoretical demand to which it would respond, it must make of philosophy, of the Philosophical Decision itself, the object of an RP. Philosophy can pass for an RP, and it attempts to evaluate this RP itself and evaluate it from science. There are numerous Philosophical RP on science, but we propose another goal: to evaluate this RP, philosophy, from science itself.

Here, the point is less to produce new axes of research – namely lines of questions or problematizing regularities like those of the CIPh – than to produce theses, indeed theorems which will be acquired in a purely transcendental way from the foundation of the One as the subject (of) science. They will be received, on the other hand, by the philosophers as simple theses, as local and paradoxical impulses, as events that are more problematic than theoretical and that they can treat under the form of a hypothesis that they should explore the echo chains. This reception of theorems under the form of philosophical theses is inevitable once and if one admits them as hardly “scientific” is at least a “reasonable” attitude (cf. Chapter IV). They are theorems because they are rigorously acquired immanently from the foundation of the One and form the theoretical content of the RP. Yet it is obvious – the resistance of philosophy towards this project is constitutional and inevitable – that they cannot be received solely theoretically by the philosophers – namely the researchers, those who transform them into questioning regularities, indeed simply working hypotheses. However, this RP predicts as much as analyzing this resistance in its own way. This will probably be the proper work of the programme director (cf. Chapter IV).

Therefore, we will state a certain number of quasi-theses which serve as a guiding thread. They can be contested, but they first should be taken account in view of inducing a global re-examination of the relations of science and philosophy. Therefore, we will propose to the researchers of this RP, on the one hand, to test the theses in the most “experimental” way possible, and on the other hand to serve, to displace as much as they can, their own problematic and the traditional position of these relations. Thus received as simple non-constraining indications –, they have the capacity of opening a working field and, above all, to open to the maximum by making the philosophical limitations of research, the auto-inhibitions of the Philosophical Decision explode [en faisant sauter]. Generally, otherwise, this RP proposes to the researchers to seek the means to give the maximal opening to the philosophical angle.

We can specify the content of this RP under four rubrics. The first is by far the principal one and must be developed the longest; the three others draw the consequences from it. There is an order between these four points of research. It goes from science towards philosophy. We seek the conditions to which science is capable of thinking by itself and draw the consequences for philosophy. The first point proposes to liberate [dégager] science from the epistemological and philosophical Illusion. The second point introduces the perspective of science into the Philosophical Decision where it makes the equivalent perspectives in view of introducing relativity into philosophy. The third point examines the consequences of this introduction for philosophy; science then implies a change of philosophy’s function and destination following from the liberation of its fictional element. The fourth point shows that a bridge is possible between Anglo-Saxon philosophy and the concept of a transcendental science as the real critique of philosophy. Through a re-evaluation of the relations of science, the philosophical circle, and transcendental truth, we are given the means to receive the style of positivist and analytic thought otherwise.

2.The Axes of Research
A) SCIENCE THINKS
1 – The Specificity of Scientific Thought
What are the conditions under which one can prove science as an autonomous and specific, consistent thought possessing an internal essence, and therefore susceptible to think itself? Transcendental conditions and conditions of positivity.

2 – Re-evaluation of Scientific Operativity
How does one interpret otherwise science’s “mute,” “naïve” and “unreflected” characters of operativity? These are the characters of an unreflected or non-thetic transcendental experience (of) oneself, deprived of the transcendence proper to the Philosophical Decision.

3 – Is the Unity of Science and Philosophy Possible?
The unitary illusion – which grounds ontology and epistemology: the unity of Science and philosophy under the authority of philosophy which would provide its object – the meaning of this object – to science. To philosophy is the objectivity of the object, to science the “ontic properties”? Critique of ontological distribution.

Their real heterogeneity: each time they have another experience of reality and another relation to it. Philosophy has an ob-ject, but it has no objects in the sense of science; or else philosophy only has objects, science does not have any: neither object nor objectivity, but a non-thetic relation to the real unreflected and in itself.

Objectivity as the philosophical re-appropriation of science.

4 – Critique of the Philosophical Reduction of Science:
a) ontology and categorial objectivity.
Philosophy: the ontological appropriation and operative rejection of science; how their reciprocal deconstruction displaces but extends this state of things;

b) the epistemological falsification of science: idealist.
But here, a scientific and not Marxist evaluation: Marxism’s falsification is globally philosophical.

The re-evaluation of the project “science of science”: its “positivist” forms, its “transcendental” forms. The re-reading of Husserl, Althusser and Anglo-Saxon epistemology in accordance with this new radical cleaving between philosophy and Science-with-a-capital-S [la science], therefore the transcendental science (of) science. The concept of a science non-thetic (of) itself: substituted for the transcendent and falsifying epistemology of the essence of science.

c) the reciprocal deconstruction of ontologos and epistemologos: a discipline to imagine and critique (for example the concept of epistemologocentrism).

d) phenomenology.
The substitution of the immanent phenomenal givens of scientific theory and practice – a description that is itself rigorous or grounded in the immanence of the One – not only for any epistemology (internal and/or external, critical or not) but any phenomeno-logy: the givens of science are phenomena-without-phenomenology. Critique of Husserl.

5 – The rigorous evaluation of the “need for philosophy” of science and scientists
Where, when, in what conjuncture? Hypothesis: any intersection or difference of two knowledges produces one such need of philosophy. An impossibility to conclude (cf. Kant) from the need of philosophy to the power of the truth of philosophy: it is more a power of the “ideological” and “political” suture than a theoretical foundation. This need remains theoretically unsatisfactory.

The double meaning of the formula “the spontaneous philosophy of the scientists”:
1) Unitary philosophy requires scientists for reasons of the techno-ideological suture but non-theoretical (science theoretically has no need for philosophy);
2) the philosophy that induces scientific theory and practice, the new functions that they assign to the Philosophical Decision (cf. Point III: from science fiction to hyperspeculation).

B) TO INTRODUCE PHILOSOPHY TO SCIENTIFIC RELATIVITY
Some indications to “initiate” reflection.

The discovery of an absolute knowledge of the scientific and no longer ontological or metaphysical type (the Philosophical Decision is always circularly relative-absolute, always relative to a given with which it breaks) – can be applied to philosophy. It then introduces a scientific principle of relativity in philosophy and forces to think the multiplicity and relativity of philosophical positions otherwise – to pose an equivalence of philosophical positions, but an equivalence of the non-philosophical type.

1 – Scientific Relativity, Philosophical Relativity
On relativity and relativism, there is a lot in philosophy. There’s only even this: the Absolute is only absolute by being penetrated with relativity (relation, perspective, multiplicity, etc. …): cf. the limit case of Nietzschean “perspectivism.” But:

a) philosophical relativism is a skepticism or a nihilism: it is a philosophical decision (which makes a reversible and circular system with the Absolute: Transcendental Unity and its varying modes, etc.). It is twice relative, reflected or “en abime.” Contrarily, the scientific relativity of movement is assumed to be “in itself” and grounded as such in the essence of theory, not grounded on a transcendence or a decision: the relativity of movement is not that of philosophical transcendence and is not understood through it but through the non-thetic relation of science (to) the real.

b) philosophical relativity is only mediately absolute or makes a system with an Absolute which is divided: both immanent and transcendent to the relativity of relations. On the other hand, the scientific Absolute (the speed of light) is also assumed to be “in itself” in the “naïve” and “operative” sense and not philosophically divided. It is immediately said (of) the relativity of perspectives and conditions them in a wholly other way than in philosophy. Scientific relativity is therefore of another essence than the philosophical and cannot be raised, interiorized by it – re-affirmed for example by the Absolute (cf. Nietzsche). Philosophy arranges the difference of relativity of perspectives and the Absolute; science excludes this arrangement: everything happens with it in the unreflected.

2 – Consequences for philosophy:
Since we here impose onto philosophy a model of scientific thought, we will directly confront, without using difference or the philosophical circle, the relativity of the philosophical positions and the One or the unreflected Absolute. We will treat philosophical decisions not as they think themselves, but with the unreflected (in the non-thetic transcendental sense) naivety with which science treats the relativity of movement. We then pose the equivalence, with regard to the One, of philosophical positions or philosophical observers of reality. A transcendental science refuses philosophical relativism but poses a relativity and an equivalency (of the scientific type) of philosophical positions. On this point see Martial Gueroult who is the first to have posed a strict equivalence of philosophical decision and done so within the framework of a science – but within a framework both empirical (the history of philosophy) and philosophical (Decision as auto-position: Fichtean idealism). We will radicalize Gueroult’s interpretation under scientific yet transcendental conditions, and by remembering that the One is no longer auto-positional and dogmatic Unity but the essence of a scientific posture in the face [envers] of the real. This absolute is what science is capable of, it is no longer at all the transcendent absolute of metaphysics and, under attenuated forms, of any Philosophical Decision.

This scientific perspective means that we see all things in the One, that we see in the One all Philosophical Decisions. We no longer see them in themselves, but in the One as the unity of absolute and incompressible measure for philosophical positions themselves. Hence, if philosophical logics are all equivalent, then there are curves and deformations in their hierarchies, contractions in the space and time of the Philosophical Decision. There is an equivalence, identity, or invariance among all of the philosophical descriptions of reality; there are no privileged perspectives. This privilege, this hierarchy is the philosophical essence of the Philosophical Decision – the universal war – not its scientific essence.

This treatment of philosophy – we admit its problematic character – will undoubtedly be felt like an extraordinary violence. Yet it is the only means to interrogate from top to bottom philocentric narcissism. It is – maybe? – the condition of a liberation of philosophy. It is a destruction of its auto-limitation. Its auto-limitation is bound to a solely relative absolute, a thetic circularity, an ignorance of the true absolute which marks the radical finitude of any thought. The philosophical descriptions of reality can finally receive a radical status within a science or a theory of the Philosophical Decision but on condition of abandoning the Transcendental Illusion which affects them.

This direction of research – one will recognize – is particularly hypothetical and risky. Yet the radical distinction that we have made of science and philosophy forces us at any rate to distinguish in a way as starkly between the scientific and philosophical forms of relativity and to imagine a correspondent relativity in “transcendental science” – a science that is non-thetic (of) itself that we defend the concept as what must dis-place philosophy.

On this basis, our problem is to try to disbar philosophy from its absolutes of the metaphysical and transcendent type which de facto limit its relativity, namely the equivalency of referentials; and to substitute for them an absolute of another type: finite in the way of the One. One will ask to what conditions of modification of the ontological positionality of temporality (in the sense of philosophy) it is possible to hold together, without contradiction, the relativity present within philosophy and this new (immanent and finite) absolute.

THEMES OF CORRESPONDENT RESEARCH
1 – Philosophy and Science: their respective conception of reference, relativity, equivalence, the absolute, and invariance.
Mach, Nietzsche, Poincaré, Einstein: one or two sources of relativity?

2 – The philosophical interpretations of Scientific Relativity:
Bergson, Meyerson, Bachelard. Their radical and constant failure: the research of the cause of this failure in the thesis – philosophical thesis – of the unity of science and philosophy, and the capacity of philosophy to elaborate the truth of science in the refusal of recognizing that science is index sui.

3 – The theory of the Philosophical Decision, its relativity and multiplicity
In the historian-philosophers (Gueroult); in the “historian” philosophers (Kant, Fichte, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida). The concepts position, topology, reference; philosophical topology (Heidegger, Deleuze) and its relation to mathematical topology. How the philosophers, in their auto-interpretation, limit the relativity of systems and philosophical positions (and their multiplicity: cf. 1).

4 – How does one introduce the “relativist” spirit into philosophy?
The philosophical systems as referentials (positional and referential): inertial and/or non-inertial referentials? The relative and absolute simultaneity: time and simultaneity in Bergson, Heidegger and Einstein, philosophical critique and scientific critique of absolute simultaneity; the scientific annulling and philosophical annulling of relativity; the scientific research of invariance applied to philosophical positions; the research of the “super-laws” of the Philosophical Decision; etc. …

C) FROM SCIENCE FICTION TO HYPERSPECULATION
1. We do not negate philosophy but “philocentrism.” If science alone gives access to the real, the claim of philosophy to access it in a privileged way, and even to able to know and determine it, is a Transcendental Illusion. Our project consists, by liberating the essence of science from its physical model, in generalizing and radicalizing the Critique of Pure Reason and, in particular, the Transcendental Dialectic: the illusion is extended from dogmatic and skeptical metaphysics to the Philosophical Decision as such (consequently including the Kantian and post-Kantian attempts of the “critique” of metaphysics). We conclude on the hallucinatory – more than illusory – nature of philosophy as to the real.

2. On the other hand, we can recognize and affirm this hallucinatory nature and in general fictional nature of the Philosophical Decision. Its real critique is also its recognition. Hence, the possibility: a) of liberating the Philosophical Decision from its circular auto-enclosure, its auto-inhibition; b) of opening it to a more radical experience of the possible and the future; we call this experience Transcendence Non-Thetic (TNT) or Non-Thetic Future: an experience of the Other as liberated from any positionality or ontology, from any exstasis or horizon – the Other is no longer a futuro-logos. It can only be acquired on a scientific (rather than religious…) basis, as the only experience of alterity which can be that of finite man as the subject (of) science; and c) of combining the Philosophical Decision and this dimension of the Non-Thetic Future to de-couple or thus “exceed” the fictional and speculative potentialities of philosophy. This project: to make cross what we call the bar of hyperspeculation. Hyperspeculation = speculation to the non-positional power.

THEMES AND DIRECTIONS OF RESEARCH:
1 – The mixture of “science-fiction”: neither science nor fiction; their reciprocal inhibition; how does one use science-without-philosophy to then liberate the fictional powers of philosophy.

The examination of the project of American “speculative fiction” and its theoretical bases.

2 – The critique of the unitary and positional concepts of imagination and fiction: to oppose hyperspeculation to them; the particular status of the Derridean “fictional”; fiction and narrative in reflexive philosophy: how does one pass from the speculative to the hyperspeculative;

3 – Kant and Fichte: the Transcendental Dialectic; the delirium and rambling of metaphysics.

The utilization of the Transcendental Dialectic and its displacement towards science fiction and hyperspeculation (from rational psychology to automata and androids; from rational cosmology to the cosmology of science fiction and hyperspeculative cosmology: the overlap of this direction of research with the transcendental relativity and equivalence of philosophical positions; from rational theology to the empires, tyrants and supermen of science fiction then hyperspeculation).

On the horizon of all of this: not only a practical liberation of philosophy as speculation, but a rigorous transcendental science of the “imaginary,” establishing a bridge between, on the one hand cosmology, psychology and mythology; and on the other hand among some territories of them; in gnostic dualisms, in metaphysics as such critiqued by Kantian “dualism”; in the type of thought – transcendental dualism – that we here reclaim.

4 – The non-philosophical uses of philosophy, its statements, its discursivity: the spontaneous philosophy of the scientists, but also the proletariat and the “poor”; the use made here of philosophy, by a “science” which wants to be “transcendental”; the utopic and fictional potentialities of philosophy in these uses.

5 – The problems of an “Artificial Philosophy”: how does one simulate the procedures of the Philosophical Decision through machines (the computerization of philosophical texts is the most elementary and least interesting degree of this project: it cannot be this at all)?

D) SCIENCE AS STAKE: LOGICAL POSITIVISM AND TRANSCENDENTAL POSITIVISM
To be brief, let’s suppose that we describe our project as a transcendental positivism. It is no longer a “positivism” à la philosophy: philosophical positivism makes of science an idea which is an abstraction of philosophy, then elevates this abstraction to the state of an autonomous concrete. Positivism proceeds in general in opposition and makes of Occam’s razor a transcendent anti-(philosophical) use and a use of limitation. Here, contrarily, science has the absolutely primitive and positive phenomenal givens as object. What’s more, they are no longer seized in their empirical and logical aspect of functional correlations – transcendent givens – but in their immanence, insofar as they constitute the essence and the real or transcendental essence. These phenomenal givens are the in-itself, they escape from the game of empirico-logical difference. This is a transcendental subversion of positivism on its own terrain.

THEMES ON EVENTUAL INVESTIGATIONS:

• The existent attempts of reconciliation of positivity and the transcendental;
• The possibilities of the bridge or passage between the two traditions
• Kant and Plato: stakes of the struggle among the two traditions; comparison of the interpretations which are given in both;
• What is the possible use of the transcendental in the English? (the transcendental being a particular functional use of a proposition which could be said as “empirical”);
• Positivism as the antidote of skepticism (= the congenital defect of philosophy);
• The dispersions of logical positivism and their reconstitution into “ordinary” unities (the explosion done by logical positivism of philosophical notions and their reconstitution); (explosion as the objective illusion of a new way of posing questions in philosophy);
• The positive as empirical difference. How the ordinary positive becomes a plane of immanence for philosophy;
• Logical positivism as radical monism;
• The Vienna Circle: the intersection of two traditions; the critique of the a priori;
• The notion of the “ordinary” as positive transcendental. The ordinary remains in the English the screen-image which limits their critique of philosophy: the object-always-there which they cannot disbar, the ball that they carry everywhere with them: the object in general which always comes back to life under varying concrete forms. The ordinary: the effect of philosophical struggle against itself with the help of an “instrument” ready to hand. The sciences and logic as Occam’s razors. How they participate in the ordinary in their own way.
• Occam’s razor: its empirical use and its transcendental use.

3. The Overlaps with the CIPh’s Axes of Research
As we have said, we do not here respond to pre-formed questions, we do not even specify them. We strive to push them through “philosophical” presupposeds of another nature.

1 – “Return, anamnesis, history”
a) Can we define an an-historical way of thinking which does not maintain a historical relation with its object (novelty/anamnesis); extending towards historicity the struggle against historicism.
b) To what conditions does a “hyperhistoric” primacy of the future become established, a radical opening which would no longer be bound by an anamnesis?
c) In what measure does the specific (non-ontological) relation of science to the real (to science’s real that it postulates immanently) fulfill these conditions?

2 – “Reason and singularity”
Hence the necessity of extending the unitary reputation to the contemporary complex and differenciated rationalities, to the games of the universal and the singular. Can we think a singular or an individual as having its essence in itself – a non-rational and non-transcendent essence? On the individual as autonomous and anterior to the universal. The concept of the non-thetic or non-positional singularity, a pre-topological singularity.

Neither interiorization/rejection of singularities by the universal, nor their difference/games/conflicts/complexities, but: the determination in the last instance of the universal by the singular, the precession of the singular over the universal: a rigorously invisible – and absurd – precession in the horizon of Greco-contemporary ontological and post-ontological presupposeds.

The concept of catastrophe and singularity: comparison between an ontology or transcendental idealism of mathematical catastrophes and a transcendental theory of individuals. This is one of the principal overlaps. Truly speaking, there is a nebula here: difference, différance, the differend, the singularities. Principal discussion must bear on the “opposition” of positional or topological singularities and non-positional singularities.

3 – “Alterity and the stake of ethics”
Can we unbind the Other (the major obsession and means of contemporary thought) from its ontological and anti-ontological context; from the positionality and diminishing of the Other? A Non-Thetic Other, a Non-Positional Transcendence? That the Other has always been admitted and required without being elucidated in its essence; that there is an essence of the Other, etc. … A re-examining of the Other on the basis: I = radically singular individual as non-thetic (of) oneself.

4 – “Presenting, representing”
On philosophy as illusion, indeed hallucination. Critique of the (very narrow) contemporary concept of Representation, Presence, etc. … Non-thetic transcendence or Future rather than staging; hyper-speculative and non-thetic fiction rather than imagination; hyper-speculation rather than the theatre; the real or scientific critique of Representation rather than its philosophical auto/hetero-critique.

Finally numerous overlaps are visible between this RP and currently active seminars at the CIPh. We cannot signal them.