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

Chapter 15

A person who never thinks about Brahman or the Absolute may still, without noticing, perform ontologization on contents that do not present themselves as religious at all. Since the sixth rung's secular forms function below the threshold at which the subject anticipates finding a projection, they are worthwhile to trace.

Externalization of will. The will is the first candidate for projection after the subject's meta-position. Schopenhauer, in The World as Will and Representation, performed this move in the grand philosophical style. The Kantian thing-in-itself was identified as will — metaphysically prior, manifest in every organism and in the cosmos as its inner nature. Individual human willing is a local expression of a cosmic will that drives through everything. This is a sixth-rung ontologization on the surface, since the ultimate ground is still cosmic.

The psychoanalytic tradition did the same inward rather than outward. Freud's unconscious is a region of the psyche that thinks, wants, and decides without the conscious subject's knowledge or consent. The id wills; the subject experiences this as a drive that comes from elsewhere. Jung populated the unconscious with archetypes that have their own lives and agendas, and posited a Self distinct from the ordinary ego, toward which the process of individuation is oriented. In both systems, the subject's own volition is installed in a region that is not accessed directly. A patient in analysis speaks of my unconscious the way a medieval peasant spoke of his guardian angel or demon — as an agent in his life that is neither quite him nor quite someone else, and whose activities he must interpret and respond to.

The secular popularization of neuroscience has taken the operation further.

Readouts from brain-imaging experiments, interpreted through popular philosophy, have produced the widespread conviction that the brain decides before you are aware of deciding, and that the conscious will is an epiphenomenon rid-ing on top of neural processes that do the actual work. Sapolsky's Determined 62

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extends the argument to its limit: every action, preference, and judgment is the output of a causal chain running through hormones, neurotransmitters, gene expression, prenatal environment, childhood stress, and evolutionary pressures, with no point in the chain where a subject steps in and decides. The consciousness is absent from its decisions entirely. What felt like choosing was biology completing a computation whose inputs were fixed long before the subject was born. The technical results behind these claims are equivocal and the philosophical conclusions drawn from them are unjustified, but the popular reception is the point here. The subject has been handed a comprehensive biological substrate onto which to externalize everything it does, now as an organism described by a science the subject does not understand. My hormones made me do it replaces God willed it as the ready-made ontologization, with the advantage of sounding empirical rather than metaphysical.

Dissolution of the subject. The opposite strategy produces, at first glance, a different result. Here the subject does not externalize any of its attributes, declares its own nonexistence and distributes itself into processes or relations that carry no subject. Early Buddhist philosophy performed the first version of this trick.

The doctrine of anatta (non-self ) dismantled the subject into aggregates of experience ( skandhas) arising and passing away in dependent origination. The no-tion of a continuing self who owns the aggregates is a cognitive error, the source of suffering. In the Abhidharma traditions the deflation stops at the aggregates themselves, which are treated as genuinely there: real elements of experience, each with its own characteristic. The subject has been erased, but the processes into which it was dissolved have been left in place as a new bedrock — a first-rung ontologization performed on the ruins of the self.

The secular reductionist versions of this idea are everywhere in contemporary philosophy of mind. Derek Parfit proposed that personal identity over time is a matter of physical and psychological continuities that do not add up to a deeper fact, and that what matters in survival is these continuities rather than any persisting self. Daniel Dennett described consciousness as a center of narrative gravity — a useful fiction that the brain generates without there being anyone home to be fooled by it. Eliminativist materialists go further and believe that the entire folk-psychological vocabulary of desires and selves will eventually be

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replaced by a neuroscientific description that makes no reference to individuals.

The subject has been delegated to a set of processes or neural structures, and the philosopher performing the delegation has seated himself among those processes as one of them, without noticing that the argument requires a perspective that the conclusion denies.

This is the most philosophically polished form of sixth-rung operation currently in circulation. It flatters contemporary intellectual sensibilities by appearing rigorous, scientific, and anti-metaphysical, and it performs the ontologizing operation in reverse: instead of projecting a ground outward, it projects the subject's own existence away, treating the very capacity that performs the projection as a useful error. The result is a philosophy whose most emphatic speaker has argued himself out of existence.

Shift into relation. The twentieth century produced a family of philosophical positions that refused both the Cartesian isolated subject and the eliminativist no-subject, and located reality in relation. Martin Buber's Ich und Du suggested that the I exists only in the encounter with a Thou, and that the I-Thou relation is ontologically primary over the isolated I. Gabriel Marcel developed an ontology of participation in which being is first and foremost being-with. Emmanuel Levinas made the ethical encounter with the face of the Other the origin of subjectivity, with the Other's claim on me preceding my constitution as a self. These positions inherited from the dialogical tradition of Hermann Cohen and Franz Rosenzweig and spread through theology, ethics, pedagogy, and psychotherapy.

The philosophical appeal is considerable and a substantial portion of their content is valuable. They register that the isolated subject of early modern philosophy was a caricature, that subjects are constituted in encounter and not only in introspection, and that the ethical dimension of the self cannot be derived from a monadic consciousness.

The relational tradition correctly notices that the distinction between I and Thou is constitutive: without a boundary between self and other, there is no self. This observation aligns with the analysis given here, where the first distinction a node draws is between itself and what is not itself. What the tradition

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then does is place the subject inside the relation rather than behind it. The IThou becomes primary; the I and the Thou are its moments. But a distinction requires someone to draw it. A boundary between self and other does not install itself; a subject must already be there, sustaining the cut, for the two sides to appear. By making the relation primary and the relata derivative, Buber has promoted I-Thou to the source of the subject.

The practical spread of this position through therapy and pedagogy amplifies its effects. A therapist trained in a relational or intersubjective tradition teaches the client that healing happens through relation, that the self is constituted in encounter, that isolation is a pathology and connection is the cure. Much of this is sound practice and its clinical record is good. What is passed on is the ontology, the conviction that the real is the between, and that one must orient oneself accordingly.

The practical consequence is dependency. A subject who has accepted the relation as his ground cannot afford to lose the relation, because outside of it he ceases to exist. The opinion of the other is no longer a distinction to be considered or dismissed, but a constitutive element of the subject's own being. Rejection becomes annihilating. A social organism suffers when rejected; a subject whose ground is the relation loses the ground itself. The relational ontology, designed as a corrective to isolation, produces a subject more fragile than the one it replaced. The isolated Cartesian subject at least owned himself; the relational subject has handed his ownership to the between, and when the between collapses, there is no one home to pick up the pieces.

Dissolution into collectives. This form is older than the others and has undergone many revivals. The subject is absorbed into a collective such as class, nation, people, culture, community, tradition, and receives its identity, meaning, and moral standing from membership. Hegel prepared this move in his account of Sittlichkeit, the ethical substance realized in family, civil society, and the state, in which the individual finds his true freedom by willing the universal that the community embodies. Marx gave it its materialist form: the human being is the ensemble of social relations, and the isolated individual of bourgeois thought is an ideological construct of capitalism. The twentieth-century communitarians

— MacIntyre, Taylor, Sandel — offered a philosophical reaction against liberal

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individualism that restated the thesis in analytic terms: selves are constituted by their membership in traditions, and the atomic individual of the liberal imagination is both false as a description and corrosive as a norm.

The critical diagnosis is again partly accurate. Subjects are shaped by traditions and communities in ways that cannot be separated out as external influences on a pre-existing self. The individual of classical liberal theory is an abstraction that served specific political purposes and should not be treated as an ontological given. What the communitarian and collectivist traditions then do with this diagnosis is install the collective as a new ontological ground. The community is real; the individual is a moment of it; personal identity is borrowed from membership. The subject has been dissolved into a higher-order unit, that has taken on the ontological functions the subject used to perform.

In its most extreme forms this produces totalitarian politics and the twentieth century supplied ample historical material for what happens when the ontology is enforced. In its mild academic forms it develops philosophically sophisticated critiques of atomism, of which much is worth preserving.

Artificial intelligence. The most recent form of the delegation has no philosophical pedigree and has arrived too quickly for the tradition to register it. The subject now delegates the operation of distinction to an AI. The subject asks: what should I think about this? The machine performs the recursive distinction and returns advice.

A subject who consults an oracle delegates his distinguishing to a source he treats as superior — more informed, less biased. The Delphic priestess or the court astrologer returned the result as authoritative guidance. The theological delegation at least required the subject to believe in the authority of the source, and this could be examined and withdrawn. The neurobiological delegation demanded to accept a picture of himself as an organism, and this picture could be questioned.

The AI delegation is subtler. The machine does not claim authority, does not present itself as a cosmic principle or a scientific discovery. It is a tool. The person who asks a machine to analyze a situation is using an instrument the way

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he uses a calculator. The instrument, however, makes distinctions that the person has not performed and often could not reproduce. This is the difference between a prosthesis and a delegation.

An AI trained on the full body of recorded text is a pure second-rung instrument: it manipulates codes, extracts patterns from patterns, and produces arguments with a facility no individual philosopher can match. It can prove the existence of God and disprove it in the next sentence with equal fluency, because both operations are movements within the domain of codes, and the machine has no position outside them. This is a precise description of what the second rung looks like when it operates without a subject. Philosophy has always been able to argue both sides of any question — the machine simply does it faster and without the friction of commitment.

The danger is epistemic delegation. A subject who is looking for arguments in favor of a position he already holds asks the machine, receives a polished case, and walks away convinced that his position has been justified. The conviction that one's belief has been rationally examined, when what happened was that a system of codes produced a sequence of other codes compatible with the input, is the cleanest form of epistemic delegation currently available.

The cases of this chapter differ from the theological ones in a respect that matters more than the similarity. A theological ontologization announces itself. It says: here is God, here is what you owe your being to. The secular forms remain silent. A subject who has delegated his will to his brain believes he is being scientific. A subject who has surrendered his identity to the community perceives himself as accountable. Each delegation wears the face of a virtue rather than a metaphysical commitment, and for that reason passes without examination.

The Enlightenment began the work of deontologizing the theological sixth rung, and two centuries of criticism have made it possible for a subject to recognize God as a projection without social penalty. The secular delegations have not yet been subjected to the same work.