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

Chapter 17

A philosopher dismantles a construct. The space where it stood is now empty, and the emptiness feels like arrival. He surveys the vacant lot, finds it uninhabitable, and pours a new foundation. The new building is smaller, less ornate, sometimes barely visible (a bedrock of practice, a doctrine of emptiness, a psychology of habits) but it is still a structure. What makes this instructive is that the operation of ontologization survived the thinker's own diagnosis of it, by moving into the diagnosis itself.

The case of Jaspers is paradigmatic: his philosophy of Existenz reached the groundlessness of the subject, held it open longer than most, and then gave the freedom away to the Transcendence. It was examined at length in The Black Flame.

Nāgārjuna in the second century produced the most radical analysis the Indian tradition ever generated. His tetralemma is a systematic refusal to ontologize any position on any rung. A thing neither exists, nor does not exist, nor both exists and does not exist, nor neither exists nor does not exist. Śūnyatā, emptiness, is the name for what remains when every candidate for inherent existence has been eliminated. A dharma is empty of svabhāva, own-being; a concept, including emptiness itself, is dependently originated and carries no ontological weight of its own. The Mādhyamaka school developed this into a philosophical framework capable of abolishing any ontologized distinction it encounters. What happened next has a well-known pattern: emptiness became a doctrine. The Mādhyamaka tradition is aware of the danger — Nāgārjuna warned that emptiness wrongly grasped is like a snake seized by the wrong end; the warning became part of the doctrine, the teaching was made a position defended against rival beliefs and required ontologizing emptiness as the correct description of how things are.

The Pyrrhonists performed a parallel operation in the Greek tradition. Pyrrho himself left no writings; the school's principles survive through Sextus Empiri-73

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cus, who compiled them in the second century. The ten tropes of Aenesidemus cataloged the ways in which the same object produces different appearances to observers. Honey tastes sweet to the healthy and bitter to the sick; the tow-er looks round from a distance and square from up close; customs that horrify one people are sacred to another. The conclusion in each case is epoché, suspen-sion of judgment about what the thing really is. The philosopher attains atarax-ia, freedom from disturbance, and this is the good at which the skeptic aims.

Undisturbedness has been promoted from a psychological result to the purpose of the entire exercise, and the one who has organized his life around its pur-suit has ontologized a state of the subject as the goal — a first-person construct where the dogmatists had third-person ones, but a construct all the same.

For the pragmatists truth is what works. A concept is to be evaluated by its practical consequences, by the difference it makes in experience, by the operations it enables. The pragmatic maxim cuts through ontological disputes by asking: what would change in practice if this thesis were true rather than its rival? If nothing changes, the dispute is empty. This breaks down a great deal of the second rung — the questions about universals, substance, causation and so on, become idle the moment their practical cash value is shown to be zero. James extended this to religion: the thesis that God exists has practical consequences for how the believer lives, and that is what the thesis means. Dewey applied it to logic and inquiry: thinking is problem-solving, and the structures of thought are tools shaped by the problems they address. The category of practice was left unexamined. Who has the experience? What counts as working? The subject who evaluates consequences by their practical value has already drawn a boundary between what matters and what does not, and treated it as self-evident.

Spencer-Brown's Laws of Form begins with the act of drawing a distinction as the primitive from which logic and arithmetic are derived. The operation is identified, placed at the foundation, and the entire structure is built from it.

What Spencer-Brown did not do was ask who draws. The calculus works without an operator; the distinction is treated as a formal primitive, self-executing, requiring no subject to sustain it. The shift from a live act performed by someone to a mark in a formal system is itself an ontologization of the fourth rung,

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where the operation has been handed to mathematical structure and the one who performs it has been subtracted from the account.

The radical constructivists (Maturana, Varela, von Glasersfeld, Luhmann) saw that every description of reality is a construction of the observer. No access to a mind-independent world is available; what the organism or the system produces is a viable fit with its environment, not a representation of how things are.

Truth is replaced with viability: a construct that works is a good model, and the question of what lies beyond is either meaningless or unanswerable. This is the pragmatist stop in a new vocabulary. The apparatus of distinction — which would have given the constructivists the instrument to analyze their own constructs, to ask how viability is assessed and by whom — was never adopted.

Luhmann went furthest, building social theory on the concept of systemas-observer, but the system replaced the subject rather than locating it.

Pascal saw the groundlessness, the eternal silence of infinite spaces terrified him; and chose the wager. He knew it was a wager, not a discovery; the famous argument does not claim that God exists but that betting on his existence is rational given the stakes. The leap is made with open eyes. Kierkegaard described the groundless existence, diagnosed the evasions by which the subject hides from it, and picked faith — the leap into the embrace of what reason cannot justify. The category of faith is impervious to argument, and Kierkegaard used it knowing exactly what he was sealing himself against. Dostoevsky gave the case for groundlessness to Ivan Karamazov and made it unanswerable — then handed the novel's final word to Zosima and Alyosha. The return to faith is a decision made at the edge, by someone who looked down and found the depth unbearable.

What none of them did was stand in the cleared space without furnishing it.

The meta-position, encountered without a construct, is a condition in which the subject holds everything it has as its own product, with nothing under-neath. Philosophy can describe this condition. Living in it is another matter, and the distance between the description and the living is where one can turn aside.