The Vanishing Point: A Left-Hand Path Reading of Philosophy by Denys Spirin - HTML preview

Chapter 7

The second rung ontologizations sit in place. Plato's forms, Plotinus' hierarchy, Maximus' logoi — each was given to the intellect as something to contemplate, and the philosopher's task was to describe it accurately. What happens when a philosopher claims that the domain generates its own content and history, and that the one thinking about it is a moment inside that history is the ontologization that we examine here.

Kant made the closest approach to transparency that classical philosophy managed. The categories of the understanding were structures of the cognizing subject, and the world as it appears to us is organized by them. Space and time were demoted in the same way into forms of sensible intuition under which anything can be given to us at all. The second rung, as the previous tradition had built it, was dismantled. Concepts were the work of the mind, imposed on a raw material that had no shape of its own.

Two residual ontologizations survived the critique. The first is the thing-in-itself, the Ding an sich. Kant held that behind the phenomenal world organized by the categories there stands a reality that affects our sensibility. We cannot say what it is, since every characterization would require categories that apply only to phenomena; we can say only that it is there. The posit is minimal, but it is a posit.

The second residual ontologization is more consequential. The categories have been removed from the world and placed in the subject — but they have been given, in that new location, a status that is not simply psychological. They are the necessary forms of any possible experience for any finite rational being. Not contingent habits or one possible organization among others, but necessary.

A reader who has followed the argument of the previous chapters can see what has happened. Kant noticed that the contents of the second rung are products of the subject's operations and drew the consequence that they do not belong to a mind-independent domain. He missed that the necessity he ascribed 29

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to those operations is itself a product of recursive distinction. To call a structure necessary for any possible experience is already to have drawn a very high-order boundary: between the forms we have and the forms we might conceiv-ably lack. Necessity and contingency are themselves entries in Kant's own table of categories. The claim that the categories are necessary employs a category to validate the system of categories. Kant needed a standpoint outside the categories from which to assess their modal status, and no such standpoint is available within his framework.

The effect on the subsequent tradition was enormous. Kant had shown that the domain of concepts could not be ontologized in its Platonic form. He had al-so left the subject as the site at which conceptual structure now resides, with a modal status strong enough to do nearly all the work the old domain used to do. The successors who took Kant seriously could not return to the Platonic domain. They had to decide what to do with the subject Kant had built.

Two paths opened. The thing-in-itself could be dissolved, and the subject could be expanded until it absorbed the world that had been standing on the far side of the boundary. Or the framework could be historicized, and the necessity Kant ascribed to timeless structures of any possible experience could be reas-signed to the developing activity unfolding through time. Fichte took the first path, Hegel chose the second and combined it with the first.

Fichte accepted the Kantian insight that the categories originate in the subject and drew a consequence Kant had resisted. A thing-in-itself we cannot in principle know is a posit we cannot make. The very assertion that there is such a thing applies the category of existence to what was defined as lying beyond the reach of the categories, and the assertion cancels itself. Fichte eliminated the residue. The only thing left was a subject, the absolute Ich, that posits itself and, in the same act, posits a not-self against which it can determine itself. This is a radical tightening of the Kantian position, and it looks like a step toward the analysis given here, where the subject is the source of every distinction. It differs, though. Fichte's Ich is not transparent to itself as the drawer of distinctions; it is ontologized as a metaphysical first principle, a foundation that generates reality through its self-positing. The subject has been relocated from the transcendental framework into the place the old domain of forms used to occupy.

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Schelling diverted the course of the operation. The Absolute cannot be either pure subject or pure object, since each is already determined by its relation to the other; it must be what precedes and contains this distinction, the point of indifference at which subject and object coincide. Nature is the Absolute in its unconscious form, developing through organic stages toward self-awareness; spirit is its conscious form, returning through art, religion, and philosophy toward the recognition of its identity with nature. The two sequences mirror each other, and philosophy discloses the identity by the special act of intellectual intuition.

Before Schelling, the domain of concepts was either statically given (Plato, the realists) or statically ordered (Plotinus, Maximus). Schelling made it move. The Absolute is a process, and it is the same whether it runs through rocks and animals or through artworks and creeds. What holds it in place now is less the architecture of the domain than the internal necessity of its unfolding. Intellectual intuition, the instrument that discloses this progress, is a single mystical act performed by the philosopher. Hegel will attack precisely this: a process that requires a mystical faculty to be seen is no real process at all, and the ontologization still rests on a special access granted to a chosen observer rather than on anything intrinsic to the domain.

Thereby, Hegel replaced the intuition with immanent motion. Ideas generate their opposites by the logic of what they are: the concept of being, taken in its pure indeterminacy, turns out to be indistinguishable from nothing; the movement between them is becoming; the full development of this pattern, carried through every concept in the right order, is the Logic — a system in which the entire conceptual order produces itself from within. Given any concept, the next follows from the contradictions internal to the first.

This move transforms the ontology of the second rung. Logic and metaphysics, separate since Aristotle, fuse into a single discipline. The Science of Logic is at the same time a science of what is, the self-development of the Idea, the totality of concepts organized by their internal necessity. The domain of concepts is no longer a separate realm, it is reality, understood as the process of its own self-articulation. Nature is the Idea in its externality; history is its temporal unfolding through finite spirit; and the state, art, religion, and philosophy are the higher

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forms in which spirit recognizes itself as the process it has been all along. The philosopher is the point where the Absolute comes to self-awareness.

The ontologization of the second rung reaches its limit here. Previous discourse required an external guarantor: the One for Plotinus, the Logos for Maximus, the divine intellect for Aquinas, the structure of rational cognition for Kant.

Hegel eliminates the guarantor. The domain authorizes itself through the internal necessity. The system is complete: it includes its own foundation as a moment within itself and is secured by being the totality that includes even the question of its security.

What Hegel did not see is that the diagnosis of contradictions in a concept, which generates the next concept, the judgment that a given synthesis adequately resolves the prior opposition — each of these is a distinction made by the philosopher, and the claim that they follow from the ideas themselves is an exaggeration. Hegel recognized that every previous ontologization had smug-gled in a subject who drew the boundaries and then pretended the boundaries drew themselves. He corrected this by absorbing the subject into the system.

Now it draws the boundaries and attributes them to an Idea that is the subject's own activity raised to the status of cosmos.

The system is also, for the same reason, maximally resistant to external critique.

A criticism made from outside the dialectic is a moment that the dialectic has already included or will include. Hegelians through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries used this trick to absorb every objection.

The ontologization of the second rung did not end with Hegel. What happened in the twentieth century was a quieter return to an earlier form.

Husserl's phenomenology is the most methodologically self-conscious attempt to escape the second rung by retreating to the first. The program begins with the epoché: the philosopher suspends every thesis about what exists beyond experience and restricts himself to what is given in consciousness exactly as it is given. The natural attitude, with its naive ontologizations, is bracketed.

The epoché dismantles the second rung by refusing to grant any concept the status of a mind-independent reality. Forms, substances, categories, the dialec-

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tical Idea — all are suspended. The philosopher stands on the first rung: here is what appears, and nothing more is claimed. Now he cannot philosophize.

Phenomena arrive as a stream of singular encounters and philosophy requires something general to say about them. Husserl saw this and introduced the eidetic reduction: a procedure by which the philosopher varies an instance in imagination, strips away everything contingent, and arrives at its essence ( We-sen) — the invariant structure of the phenomenon. The temporality of temporal experience, the spatiality of spatial objects — each is disclosed as an ideal object.

Thus, the second rung is reinstalled on top of the first. The essences are patterns extracted from the comparison of imaginatively varied instances; and then assigned a status that exceeds the material they were extracted from. Husserl resisted the label of Platonism and had something more disciplined in mind, but the principle remains the same. The phenomenologist has generated a new domain of ideal objects and populated it through a method that certifies its own results.

The methodological defense makes this version harder to dislodge than the Platonic original. Any objection from outside the method can be answered with the claim that the objector has not performed the reduction correctly and therefore has not seen what the phenomenologist sees. A critic must first become a phenomenologist to criticize — and by the time he has, he is inside the apparatus.

Frege did the same work on the other side of the continental-analytic divide. In Der Gedanke he argued that thoughts are inhabitants of a third realm, a drittes Reich, where they exist objectively and timelessly, waiting to be grasped. The Pythagorean theorem is true whether or not anyone thinks it; it was true before Pythagoras; it will be true after the last mathematician. The entire analytic tradition of mathematical logic, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mathematics that descends from here inherits the ontologization as background furniture, without defending it and often without noticing it is there.

Phenomenology and analytic philosophy, taken as the two major streams of twentieth-century thought, were typically presented as opposites, but they are

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variants of a single gesture: the restoration of an ontologized domain of concepts performed in a secular key and protected by a methodology. The ontologization has survived its own supposed death by moving into the techniques through which professional philosophy is practiced.